Mann’s new sea level hockey stick paper

WUWT readers may recall yesterday where Dr. Mann was so eager to list this paper on his resume/CV, he broke the embargo set for 15:00 EST June 20th, today, at which time this blog post appears.

As much as this is an editorial target rich environment, I’m going to publish this press release and paper sans any editorial comment. There’s plenty of time for that later. Let’s all just take it in first. Below, figure 2 from the Kemp et al 2011 paper. It should look familiar. Note the reference in Figure 2 to GIA (Glacial Isostatic Adjustment) adjusted sea level data, which has recently been the subject of controversy, it was first noted here on WUWT.

Fig. 2. (A) Composite EIV global land plus ocean global temperature reconstruction (1), smoothed with a 30-year LOESS low-pass filter (blue). Data since AD 1850 (red) are HADCrutv3 instrumental temperatures. Values are relative to a preindustrial average for AD 1400–1800 (B) RSL reconstructions at Sand Point and Tump Point since BC 100. Boxes represent sample specific age and sea-level uncertainties (2σ). Inset is a comparison with nearby tide-gauge data. (C) GIA-adjusted sea level at Sand Point and Tump Point expressed relative to a preindustrial average for AD 1400–1800. Sealevel data points are represented by parallelograms because of distortion caused by GIA, which has a larger effect on the older edge of a data point than on the younger edge. Times of changes in the rate of sea-level rise (95% confidence change-point intervals) are shown. Pink envelope is a nine degree polynomial to visually summarize the North Carolina sea-level reconstruction.

PHILADELPHIA — An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.

The research was conducted by members of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in Penn’s School of Arts and Science: Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Andrew Kemp, now at Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute.

Their work will be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 20.

“Scenarios of future rise are dependent upon understanding the response of sea level to climate changes. Accurate estimates of past sea-level variability provide a context for such projections,” Kemp said.

In the new study, researchers provided the first continuous sea-level reconstruction for the past 2,000 years and compared variations in global temperature to changes in sea level during this time period.

The team found that sea level was relatively stable from 200 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. During a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years. There was then a second period of stable sea level associated with a cooler period, known as the Little Ice Age, which persisted until the late 19th century. Since the late 19th century, however, sea level has risen by more than 2 millimeters per year on average, which is the steepest rate for more than 2,100 years.

To reconstruct sea level, the research team used microfossils called foraminifera preserved in sediment cores from coastal salt marshes in North Carolina. The age of these cores was estimated using radiocarbon dating and several complementary techniques.

To ensure the validity of their approach, the team members confirmed their reconstructions against tide-gauge measurements from North Carolina for the past 80 years and global tide-gauge records for the past 300 years. A second reconstruction from Massachusetts confirmed their findings. The records were also corrected for contributions to sea-level rise made by vertical land movements.

The team’s research shows that the reconstructed changes in sea level during the past millennium are consistent with past global temperatures and can be described using a model relating the rate of sea-level rise to global temperature.

“The data from the past help to calibrate our model and will improve sea-level rise projections under scenarios of future temperature rise,” research team member Stefan Rahmstorf said.

###

In addition to Horton and Kemp, the research was conducted by Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, Martin Vermeer of Finland’s Aalto University School of Engineering in Finland and Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Geological Survey, the Academy of Finland, the European Science Foundation through European Cooperation in Science and Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

We present new sea-level reconstructions for the past 2100 y based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment.
Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950. Sea level then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6 mm/y, followed by a further period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century. Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892. Using an extended semiempirical modeling approach, we show that these sea-level changes are consistent with global
temperature for at least the past millennium.

Figure 1: Two points in salt Marshes in North Carolina are used as the basis for the study:

Fig. 1. Litho-, bio-, and chrono-stratigraphy of the Sand Point (A) and Tump Point (B) cores (North Carolina, USA). Chronologies were developed using AMS 14C dating (conventional, high-precision, HP, and bomb-spike), 210Pb, 137Cs, and a pollen horizon (Ambrosia). All dating results were combined to produce a probabilistic age-depth model for each core (10), shown as a gray-shaded area (95% confidence limits). This model estimated the age (with unique uncertainty) of samples at 1 cm resolution. Paleo marsh elevation (PME) above mean sea-level (MSL) was estimated for each sample by application of transfer functions to complete foraminiferal assemblages. Only the most abundant species are shown (Hm ¼ Haplophragmoides manilaensis). RSL was estimated by subtracting PME from measured sample altitude.

Materials and Methods
Sea level in North Carolina was reconstructed using transfer functions relating the distribution of salt-marsh foraminifera to tidal elevation (7, 12). Application of transfer functions to samples from two cores (at sites 120 km apart) of salt-marsh sediment provided estimates of PME with uncertainties of <0.1 m. For each core a probabilistic age-depth model (10) was developed from composite chronological results and allowed the age of any sample to be estimated with 95% confidence. In Massachusetts, plant macrofossils preserved in salt-marsh sediment overlying a glacial erratic, were dated using AMS 14C and pollen and pollution chronohorizons (Fig. S1). The modern distribution of common salt-marsh plants was used to estimate PME. Sea level was reconstructed by subtracting estimated PME from measured sample altitude. Corrections for GIA were estimated from local (13) and US Atlantic coast (15) databases of late Holocene sea-level index points. Detailed methods are presented in SI Text.

They compare data at points around the world to the new SL hockey stick (in pink in the background):

Fig. 3. Late Holocene sea-level reconstructions after correction for GIA. Rate applied (listed) was taken from the original publication when possible. In Israel, land and ocean basin subsidence had a net effect of zero (26). Reconstructions from salt marshes are shown in blue; archaeological data in green; and coral microatolls in red. Tide-gauge data expressed relative to AD 1950–2000 average, error from (32) in gray. Vertical and horizontal scales for all datasets are the same, and are shown for North Carolina. Datasets were vertically aligned for comparison with the summarized North Carolina reconstruction (pink).

Conclusions
We have presented a unique, high-resolution sea-level reconstruction developed using salt-marsh sediments for the last 2100 y from the US Atlantic coast. Post-AD 1000, these sea-level reconstructions are compatible with reconstructions of global temperature, assuming a linear relation between temperature and the rate of sea-level rise. This consistency mutually reinforces the credibility of the temperature and sea-level reconstructions. According to our analysis, North Carolina sea level was stable
from BC 100 to AD 950. Sea level rose at a rate of 0.6 mm/y from about AD 950 to 1400 as a consequence of Medieval warmth, although there is a difference in timing when compared to other proxy sea-level records. North Carolina and other records show
sea level was stable from AD 1400 until the end of the 19th century due to cooler temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age. A second increase in the rate of sea-level rise occurred around AD 1880–1920; in North Carolina the mean rate of rise was 2.1 mm/y in response to 20th century warming. This historical rate of rise was greater than any other persistent, century-scale trend during the past 2100 y.

“To ensure the validity of their approach, the team members confirmed their reconstructions against tide-gauge measurements from North Carolina for the past 80 years and global tide-gauge records for the past 300 years.”

I’m sure there is no chance of any observational errors in a 300 year old record done by 10 generations of tidal gauge “volunteers” … naaahhh … I’m sure they all used GPS coordinates to confirm their locations and “altitude” …

also no chance of sediment accretion or erosion over that 300 or 80 year record … no chance …

How difficult would it have been for Mann to include recent data points? Is there a good reason (besides the ones I want to see) why he stopped data collection/recreation ten years ago?
=======================================================================================
Probably because the satellite (Envisat) measurements don’t agree…………..

Why are the error bars shaped like tilted rectangles in some of the graphs? This implies that uncertainty in dating of a sample has an impact on the implied sea level in a predictable and biased manner. Some error rectangles slope downwards, while others slope upwards. And why does the Iceland data have essentially no significant dating errors, while the others have significant dating errors?

I visit Wrightsville Beach and Fripp Island most every Summer. I love the Outer Banks also and have never noticed any of this man’s alarmist proclamations. Tarheel born and bred(though I despise Carolina). NC State here. A working man’s institution rife with veterinary, scientific, engineering, and architectural glory.

That said, next visit to the old North State, come say hello and we will hold an evening of climate change exchange in friendly confines…….my study. Plus, I make the best Old-Fashioned you will ever bring to your lips Mr. Watts. Have I had one too many already? Thanks for what you do every day……every single day.

As a resident of North Carolina and a love of the barrier islands (the Outer Banks), I have to cry foul.

Why was the shifting sands of the North Carolina chosen? The barrier islands are formed because of the Gulf Stream current. That means they didn’t exist at one time. The sands are never, ever still and new inlets are being formed all the time. Take a drive on NC highway 12 and see for yourself. There is an inlet called Oregon Inlet which was formed after a hurricane. (It is named after a ship that went through the newly formed inlet.) The sand is so unsteady there that our tax dollars go to keep Oregon Inlet an inlet to save time for commercial ships. The bridge that goes over Oregon Inlet, the Bonner Bridge, is rated a 2 out 10 in the quality of bridges. It is impossible to keep it in good shape because of the constant shifting sand.

My point in all this is simple. Blackbeard the pirate didn’t hide off North Carolina because of the weather. He hid there because the sands are always shifting. North Carolina, like Florida, is a hurricane magnet. Furthermore, North Carolina also gets Nor’easters. Both of these cause tremendous amounts of erosion. The tidal gauge measurements aren’t exactly the most reliable on this earth. I will bet money North Carolina was chosen, and not some other state or provence just because it would deliver the desired results.

Firstly the comment “consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.”
I am not sure how you can have several hundred years of cooling and simultaneously have rising sea levels and call it a “consistant link”!!!

Secondly, no link is actually proven and thirdly, two points on the north carolina coast can not be assumed to be a proxie for a) the entire world b) the entire USA!

I wonder if they compensated for glacial rebound using one of the more modern reconstructions. I seem to recall that in some of the reconstructions by the U of Toronto geophysics crowd, the N. Carolina area is actually in the far field zone of the Laurentian ice sheet, which means that it is currently falling, not rising, due to the viscous relaxation from the removal of N. American continental glaciation. These sorts of corrections are themselves time dependent, so you have to use a mantle viscosity model along with an ice loading model to correct for apparent sea level rise/fall. I would suspect that this sort of study, done properly, would not be for the faint-hearted. I also note that the glacial rebound models have to be calibrated, in turn, by sea level records, so the potential for at least “ellipticity”, if not a certain amount of circularity in the reasoning exists.

1. At least 4 times they mentioned ESTIMATED Paleo marsh elevation (PME). So still guessing, are they?

2. “…these sea-level reconstructions are compatible with reconstructions of global temperature, assuming a linear relation between temperature and the rate of sea-level rise…” Still no proof that there is a linear relation, just an assumption that there is.

3. It’s amazing how sea level is “stable” when the temps are cooler, but always rise when warmer. If you assume their linear relation between temps and sea level rise, there should also be noticeable dips during the LIA.

They’re making all this assumption on TWO sites in N Carolina. Just think how much worse it would have appeared if they had used the coast of Louisana.

An important aspect of experimental science is replication. ENVISAT is a European Space Agency satellite which also measures changing sea levels. It finds a trend which is significantly less than TOPEX/JASON/U. of Colorado

In fact, in line with Craig Loehle’s ARGO data assessment and my own calculations on the steric sea level, it shows negligible sea level rise in the last few years on their adjusted data, and a fall on their unadjusted data.

When considering sea level that may or may not be changing in quantities measured in mm per year, it is worth bearing in mind that in order to measure them, we have to know where the satellites doing the measuring are extremely accurately. Due to the fluctuation of solar activity, the orbits of the satellites experience varying amounts of drag from the expanding and contacting outer shell of Earth’s atmosphere. It is extraordinarily difficult engineering and computer science stuff, and I wonder whether the error is larger than the signal.

The fact that these two platforms and software systems arrive at trends varying by several hundred percent indicates to me that there is a possibility that human decisions are a factor, and as you know, these are influenced by more than just technical considerations.

Upside down Mann Thinks:
“The European Space Agency people are not on message with their danged ENVISAT”

“The currently accepted value is 2.5±0.5 mm/year.
However, every few years we learn about mishaps or drifts in the altimeter instruments, errors in the data processing or instabilities in the ancillary data that result in rates of change that easily exceed the formal error estimate, if not the rate estimate itself.”

And

“It seems that the more missions are added to the melting pot, the more uncertain the altimetric sea level change results become.”

My father’s side of the family lived in Florida for seven generations. I have numerous friends and relations with oceanfront property and not one of them has any concern about rising sea levels. I would really love for Mann to point out any place where Americans have had to abandon property due to sea level increases. Real sea level increases and not subsidence. Much like the elusive proof that climate changes are unnatural, this will also go unanswered.

As I see it, all this paper shows is the rate of local subsidence at two present day marshy points in NC.
It is loaded with sample bias. Figure 3 screams evaluation attention bias toward the sites that perform as desired.

Once again we see calibrated and measured (recent) data compared to filtered (old) proxy data and amazingly it produces the required hockey stick. I have not read the paper yet, but my spidey senses are telling me that there’s a mannomatic PCA somewhere in the filtering process.

“It is a pretty good bet that land subsidence in the North Carolina coastal plain is due to heavy pumping of ground water from aquifers referred to in various places in these web pages, namely the Black Creek and Upper Cape Fear aquifers. This last plot has some very interesting testimony to that theory. The rate of subsidence at Cove City increased in the second interval covered in the leveling runs (from 1968 to 1978) from 0.17 to 0.25 inches per year. This can be explained by New Bern bringing their Cove City water supply wells on-line in the late 1960s. Higher rates of land subsidence are associated with higher ground water withdrawal rates.”

By the way, didn’t UpsideDownMann get awarded a couple of million bucks to buzz off and study mosquito vectors in Mongolia or something? Did anyone get anything for the cash? How come he’s back climatebothering us so soon?

These so called scientists don’t even take the time to cross check their work with reality.

Here is a picture of Kitty Hawk Beach circa 1950:

And here is a modern view looking the opposite way.

I don’t detect any significant rise in sea level (not accounting for hi/lo tide, etc). In fact, the idea of using glacial rebound on a barrier island is ludicrous. The barrier island would probably not rebound at all in the modern era.

Lowering reconstructed temperature by 0.2 K for the period
AD 500–1100 produced good agreement with the North Carolina
sea-level reconstruction (Fig. S4). We studied the sensitivity of
this fit to a range of temperature corrections (−0.1 K to −0.3 K).
As shown in Fig. S5, the best agreement was for a −0.2 K correc-
tion. An error of this magnitude is not implausible as we used
the global Mann et al. (34) reconstruction prior to AD 1100
and not the Northern-Hemisphere-only reconstruction in which
Mann et al. (34) had greater confidence. For the period prior
to AD 1100, availability of proxy temperature reconstructions
is poor for the Southern Hemisphere and this is necessarily
reflected in greater uncertainty for global estimates which can
accommodate a 0.2 K reduction in temperature within their
uncertainty. This reduction in reconstructed temperature would
make the Medieval Climate Anomaly globally less pronounced
than Mann et al. (34) suggested, and reduce by a half its tempera-
ture contrast with the Little Ice Age

This is another clever obfuscation of reality that of course neglects atmospheric circulation patterns in relation to sea level changes distribution. Even looking at the heterogeneity of the sea level map by Cazenave and co. one can see it is easy to manipulate whatever one wishes to say. The same paper could be made carefully selecting sites of sea level drop. And to boot they still have to adjust… LOL
And guess what it also matches the HadCRUT curve…
Climategate hitting CRU hit at teh heart of the Global Warming fraud.
Mann should be fired with cause.

I bet they used the data upside down… Just kidding. That trick has already been pulled. I can’t wait to see what Steve McIntyre does with this paper. I wonder if they archived the data and code? Has this method of sea level reconstruction ever been used before? I have a hard time believing this approach will be as valid tree rings… and we already know those don’t make good thermometers.

A transfer function? Sounds to me like they used math to determine how far above sea level these samples were created 2000 years ago? Anyone have anything to say about the validity of that assessment of their method?

Bull since the sites are carefully selected. Take a sea level satellite map for Cazenave and see how the distribution of sea level anomalies follow atmospheric circulation patterns. Another Mann made fraudulent claim!

tallbloke tide gauges and several hundred years records where is no proof of reading continuity are better ?
The reality is just like the ‘magic tress’ there a other factors that can affect what is observed here , the default to AGW its not proving, even if you start with the premiss it has to be .

Looks like Mann’s modeling software is good for all kinds of things. Add air you get a hockey stick shaped warming graph, add water and you get a hockey stick shaped sea level rise. I suspect he is selling the idea that if you add enough money you can get a hockey stick shaped stock market graph as well.

A curiousity in the figure showing Mann’s temp record with the sea level rise record:

The temp record peaks (until very recently) just before 1000 AD. Temps then fall.

Meanwhile, sea level starts a 400 year steady rise just about the time that temps peak and start to fall. The sea level rate of increase of about 0.6 millimeters per year starts around 1000 AD and finally levels off about 1400 AD.

Am I wrong, or isn’t sea level rise, if causally correlated with temperature increase, supposed to be reasonably synchronous?

Why just this region? What about the global sea level rise? Seems like a cherry picking exercise.

Not at all! It’s only cherry picking if the intent is to mislead. The paper looks at North Carolina because that is the data they are using. It quite clearly states that, but they also go to the lengths of correcting for GIA.

How difficult would it have been for Mann to include recent data points? Is there a good reason (besides the ones I want to see) why he stopped data collection/recreation ten years ago?

That would be because it is a paleo-reconstruction of a 2000+ year period. Proxies generally don’t exist right up until yesterday. And even if he could and did go the extra 10 years, it would only add 0.05% to the length of the x-axis. Welcome to non-cherry-picked science.

Jeff Carlson says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:13 pm

So now Mann says there was a MWP ? Its so confusing …

Mann never denied these phenomena, only their extent and amplitude. The data says what it says!

How can Micheal Mann assume that the sedimentary data has not been disturbed by the forces of nature? North Carolina has been hit by legions of hurricanes over the millennia. All it takes is one strong hurricane to strip (or deposit) feet of sediment at a location.

As an example. I was on the island of St. Thomas, US. Virgin Islands during hurricane Hugo. The hotel I was originally staying it lost 50+ feet of sea wall protected shoreline property (meaning the ocean moved the shoreline 50+ feet closer to the hotel.) There was also about a 3 foot depth of sand, gravel, and debris deposited into the parking lot. All that from one storm.

Corrections for GIA were estimated from local (13) and US Atlantic coast (15) databases of late Holocene sea-level index points. Detailed methods are presented in SI Text.

The crucial step to go from local subsidence and relative (to local) sea level to the Global GIA sea level is in the correction factors from these two holocene databases, which are unaffected by the work in this paper.
What is the correction f(t) and what error bars are on their data points?

The corrections result in the diagonal sides of the rombus data points on the GIA graph.

“Note that members of the NAS are permitted to communicate up to 4 papers per year. The members are responsible for obtaining two reviews of their own papers and to report the reviews and their responses to the reviews. Note, as well, that rejection of such contributions by the Board of PNAS is a rare event, involving approximately 2% of all contributions.”

These so called scientists don’t even take the time to cross check their work with reality.

Here is a picture of Kitty Hawk Beach circa 1950:

And here is a modern view looking the opposite way.

I don’t detect any significant rise in sea level (not accounting for hi/lo tide, etc). In fact, the idea of using glacial rebound on a barrier island is ludicrous. The barrier island would probably not rebound at all in the modern era.

The Hockey Team is still desperate to find their hockey stick.

And you can tell from those two photos that the 4 inch or so rise they are claiming over that period must be phoney? Wow!

An error of this magnitude is not implausible as we used
the global Mann et al. (34) reconstruction prior to AD 1100
and not the Northern-Hemisphere-only reconstruction in which
Mann et al. (34) had greater confidence.
=========================================================
good grief………………..

“Since the late 19th century, however, sea level has risen by more than 2 millimeters per year on average,”
Since the late 19th century, sea level has risen by more than 7 inches, and no one noticed……
….and it’s a travesty they didn’t

Why don’t they take it further back and start the sea level rise graph at end of the Pleistocene? That initial 140 meter sea level rise as the North American and European glaciers melted would make this current sea level rise look like a drop in the bucket. But then, that represented real climate change.

the moorings of major ports like Benghazi, Libya, Istanbul etc are in exactly the same sea level place that they were constructed with hundreds of years ago.

the Tower of London – another Medieval construction along the Thames is at the same relation to the river, if you compare a contemporary photograph with artistic expositions of the time of its construction.

Just a few empirical facts there, so I rather suggest that Mann cam to his conclusion first then worked backwards to make the data fit

AJStrata has the right idea with photographs. I bet there are hundreds of photos spanning 100+ yrs of various parts of the US coastline. As many have suggested, beach front prices are not falling off the cliff !
Good fun at Bishop- Hill site re. IPPC report – clever people needed to help.

PME, Paleo Marsh Elevation (above local mean sealevel) is between 0.07 and 0.25 meters throughout the entire 2000 year history of the location. We are to believe that any collection of 3 or 4 nanofossils can have a AVERAGE mean sea level value with a precision of 1 or 2 cm when superimposed upon by tides, hurricanes, local river meanders, and reworking of sediment?

I also note that the nanofossils chosen are different at the two locations, at least as depicted in Fig 1. So what did they do? Use a different transfer function for each location?

Mann and Penn State have apparently forgotten the Scientific Method. It matters not if you can find 1, 2 or a dozen examples where sea level is accelerating.

If there is a single example that sea level is not accelerating, then according to the scientific method, unless you can find a cause why it is not accelerating, it is not accelerating. Period, end of story.

Anything can be “proven” by looking for examples of where it is true. A broken watch gives you the right time more than 700 times a year. This is not proof that it is keeping time. The proof that the watch is not keeping time is whether you can find examples where it is not true.

There are plenty of examples showing that sea level rise is not accelerating. Look at the WWII waterfront facilities built in the Pacific. Look at the records from even earlier.

The level of sea level rise is so small that they have had to add .3mm per year “correction” to allow for the rise that is not taking place because of rebound since the ice ages. Why? The rise is not taking place, but still we have to add it in, as though it was.

Why not add a correction for evaporation? Like rebound after the ice ages, the oceans would be rising a lot more if it wasn’t for evaporation.

Benthic foraminifera in a lagoon environment present in a core sample have probably been through the gullet of some animal or displaced by some burrowing organism multiple times. To be crude, lagoonal sediment like this have been best described as worm sh*t. The forams did not die and lay undisturbed on the bottom.

When you look at relative abundance of the different foraminifera species, are you looking at preservation issues (some foraminifera shells are delicate). Are human influences considered (i.e. pesticide runoff killing the little critturs). What about, temperature, salinity and lets not forget the occasional hurricane coming through and giving everything a good mixing. Sea level IS NOT the only environmental factor in benthic micro faunas.

In fairness to Mann, he didn’t design this study, conduct the research or write the paper. His contribution was data analysis. Of course, he is the go-to guy for magical correlations and hockey sticks.

Use of Mann’s 2008 temperature reconstruction seemed rather weak (if not entirely foolish). The statistical analysis seems a bit hinky to me, but I do not possess the expertise to challenge it. Perhaps Willis Eschenbach or Steve McIntyre will take a stab at it. Most of my doubts concern the use of this particular proxy for sea level and, of course, where they chose to sample.

Measuring sea levels with salt-marsh foraminifera micro fossils is quite a sensitive and valid method to measure the depth of the sea bottom in the past. We should not, therefore suspect fraud in the data. However, this technique does not measure sea level, but marsh bottom instead. It is well known that marshes have been in-filling in modern times due to sedimentation from accelerated land erosion. What this report in essence measures, is the rate of land erosion, which has very little to do with sea level rise. That this fact is omitted from the paper may be called fraud.

This is typical Mann cherry-picking of proxies. The same kind of cherry-picking he did in MBH98 and Mann08, where he used the corrupted Tiljander proxy, even though he had been informed beforehand that the Tiljander sediments had been overturned due to road work. He used the proxy anyway because it provided the hockey stick shape that shows up in all of his papers.

What is Mann’s motivation for producing his BS [bad science]?
Money, and lots of it:

Michael Mann grants, 1996 – 2005:

Development of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term Variability in the Monsoons, $250,000

Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, $1,884,991

Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, $541,184

A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, $330,000

Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last Millennium, $78,000

Total: $6,232,700

This is an incomplete list. For example, there was also the post-Climategate payola grant of $1.8 million to study mosquito vectors. Mann is not an epidemiologist or a biologist. Draw your own conclusions.

You know, I’m a bit disappointed with this. I was looking forward to dissecting the paper and having a great contentious discussion about it………. it doesn’t seem to rise above the level of a derisive snort. Medieval Climate Anomaly?? lol, it was never known as that. People, other than history revisionist typically call it the Medieval Warm Period, but whatever……. all from N. Carolina……wow. Based on, in part fictional highly contentious temp reconstructions. Yep, that just about seals it for me!! I’m going to Wallyworld right after work and buy me some floatys!!!

A quick internet search shows, as others have already attested, that isostatic rebound and tectonic subsidence can exceed the measured rise attributed to temperature change by an order of magnitude, and even groundwater pumping can match the magnitude. The paper states that “all records from the Atlantic coast of North America, Gulf of Mexico, and New Zealand (23) show stable or falling sea level between AD 1400 and 1900…” Reference 23 is from New Zealand. Meanwhile, there are pages and pages of botanical references to a steadily rising relative sea level on the Atlantic coast of the US in the form of buried stumps and roots. This paper is just a thin veneer of empirical data swabbed over a modeling approach that uses Mann’s hockey stick as input.

RHS says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How difficult would it have been for Mann to include recent data points? Is there a good reason (besides the ones I want to see) why he stopped data collection/recreation ten years ago?
====================================
===================================
John B says:
June 20, 2011 at 1:03 pm
That would be because it is a paleo-reconstruction of a 2000+ year period. Proxies generally don’t exist right up until yesterday. And even if he could and did go the extra 10 years, it would only add 0.05% to the length of the x-axis. Welcome to non-cherry-picked science.
========================================
========================================
John, I know it’s a press release, but it says “any time in the past 2,000 years”.
That would include the past 10 years.

In their conclusions they say “salt-marsh sediments for the last 2100 “, which also includes now.
Even their title implies now “over the past two millennia”

Biggest problem is, they used Mann’s reconstruction that does include measured data. Then turned around and picked a time frame for their sediment paleo that didn’t include the measured data of the past decade.

Yes, they could have included the last decade.
They’ve done it before.
They cherry picked……

Footnotes 1 and 2 indicate the basic premise of the paper rests on the foundation
of Mike Mann’s old hockey stick reconstructions and GISS temperature calculations
(with the database “revised”) along with the UEA-Met temp revisions controlled by
Jones, et., all endorsed by the ever accurate IPCC reports… written by the “Team”
and their associates.

This is not an auspicious opening paragraph for “new” scientific information.

The best counterpoints in the above comments are enough to discredit this paper, but what if it were right, that there was a sea level rise of 6-7 inches in the 100 years leading up to 2000? Something similar would be expected in a warming climate, but it doesn’t add a single ounce of weight to the AGW hypothesis. The temperature record isn’t that seriously contested – so far – and on its own is only proof (so far as it’s accurate) that the temperature has risen. Nothing else can be deduced from it. Same applies to this paper – the sea level at one point appears to have risen and that’s all. It’s a pointless exercise from a scientific point of view – except for one little thing . . . . if the supposed rise in sea level can be explained away by, let’s say, reverse glacial rebound (northern Canada is on the rise and therefore there might be an opposite effect at work on the area measured in this paper) then that would cast some doubt on the temperature record! . . Long shot, but not impossible . . .

The reference to the hockey stick model is very apt here as once again they appear to have mislaid the post-Roman cool/wet period when sea levels rose substantially, as Hubert Lamb pointed out many years ago. As Hubert Lamb, the climate scientists responsible for setting up the UEA research unit, wrote about the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period his books are just the thing to debunk this latest hoax. See also Basil Cracknell, Outrageous Waves: Global Warming and Coastal Change in Britain over 2000 Years, Philimore of Chichester: 2005 in which he highlights exactly what happened with rising sea levels in the 4th and 5th centuries AD – completely different to what this paper claims. Yes, I think there is more than enough evidence out there to pull this little caper apart

Last time I looked it seemed to me that water tends to run downhill.So even if readings are higher in one place than another equilibration will surely occur,though there may be a time lag as water does take some time to run downhill.So, if rising levels were to be of any significance they would have to rise everywhere, wouldnt they? Localised “rise” will, of course appear to have ocurred where there has been land subsidence.Then the issue becomes subsidence against what set point.Logically the centre of the earth ? But I doubt even the most sophisticated satellite can get a fix on that.Even then if land subsides anywhere must it not bulge elsewhere as the earth is surely not compressible. Trivial(by terrestrial standards) subsidence can of course occur by pumping out ground water etc,but this wouldnt affect ocean level. Enough, my head is beginning to go round.

Given that sea levels vary globally and the generally accepted figure is a global average, it seems very fortunate that the chosen locale for the study reflects exactly what one would expect if the concensus view is correct.

However something I’ve long wondered – sea level rise is claimed to threaten low lying sea fronts, thus practically speaking one MUST notice this change occurring – somewhere. I’d like to see anecdotal evidence from as many people as possible all over the world about what sea level is doing where they live. Anecdotal is not scientific, sure, but if water rises far enough to affect property then it MUST eventually be noticeable, now mustn’t it. Regardless of the statistics involved.

My own observations from a place called Hervey Bay on the coast of Australia. Over the course of 50 years, I have not noticed any significant change at all. If anything, the sea level seems to be less now as king tides in the 70s often caused water to flood onto the esplanade which I don’t think it does now. Now I could be wrong, but anecdotally at least I see no difference at all.

I grew up next to the River Mersey estuary in the UK. It had tidal ranges of up to 30 feet and the landing stages for the ferries were floating and sometimes were a level walk and others a quite steep walk.

I’ve always been a bit suspicious since then about people who claim to be able to measure sea level rises in terms of ‘millimetres’.

“Time and Tide wait for no man” is a very old saying.
It’s the 21st Century so it is now “Time, Temperature and Tide wait for no Mann”
Guess that Mikes’ accelerating sea-levels are hiding in the same pipeline as Trenberths’ (The Travesty) missing Heat.
Jeesh Guys, it must be getting a tad over-crowded in there!

They claim that the “change point” for the modern sea level rise was from 1865-1892… But the inflection of the sea level curve actually occurred in ~1800… About 80 years before anthropogenic CO2 emissions started to climb.

Development of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term Variability in the Monsoons, $250,000

Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, $1,884,991
…

This is an incomplete list. For example, there was also the post-Climategate payola grant of $1.6 million to study mosquito vectors. Mann is not an epidemiologist or a biologist. Draw your own conclusions.

It’s second on your list Smokey.
I was asking earlier when we could expect to see that paper.

“The principle reason 300 elite Spartans, 600 Helots, 1,000 Phocians and possibly 2,000 Thebans were able to hold off the Army of Xerxes for three days had as much to do with sea level as it did to the fanatical training of the Spartans.”

Yes — there are actually TWO monuments to the 300. The original is about a mile from the ocean, the new one is closer to the coast road. The sea has withdrawn/the land has risen enough that the site would not make an effective choke point today!

tallbloke lets remember that part of university ‘defense’ of Mann’s work was that he brought in good grant money , what that had to scientific integrate is another question. So these grants are double useful to Mann.

Salt Marshes, like Barrier Islands and Sand Bars, are made out of shifting sand. Someone else needs to look at something more solid and unshifting, like rock maybe. Oh yes, and don’t forget to add in the guessitmated amount of landform rise during the period too, understand that since all the glaciers melted the continents have been growing taller; at least in the far northern hemisphere. Who knew?

My own observations from a place called Hervey Bay on the coast of Australia. Over the course of 50 years, … I see no difference at all.

Same in Vancouver Canada.

You don’t need to study obscure micro fauna to determine the past eights of the oceans, except of course if you are looking to being a fictitious record. British seamen 200 years ago in wooden sailing vessels mapped the oceans to degree of accuracy almost unheard of in present day, because their lives depended on it.

Navigation charts of the ocean from 200 years ago are still accurate as to the heights of drying and submerged rocks, except in area where there have been earthquakes and volcanoes. If there has been any appreciable sea level rise it will be shown in these charts. But it isn’t. These charts are still accurate today.

These are the most accurate records on earth of past sea levels prior to industrialization. The British Admiralty charts. Proof that seal level change is a hoax.

. Litho-, bio-, and chrono-stratigraphy of the Sand Point (A) and Tump Point (B) cores (North Carolina, USA
The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment
Sea level was reconstructed by subtracting estimated PME from measured sample altitude.
================================================================================
Sand Point NC is subsiding
Tump Point NC is rising

It seems to me that if you compare the reconstructed NC data to all the other areas sampled, the sea level which forms the backbone of this paper is actually way below average. What this means is that the dramatic upward trend merely brings NC sea levels up par with all the other reconstructed areas.

I live in an area here in Alberta what was once under salt water known as the shallow Western Interior Seaway. Here in oil sands country we often dig up marine mammals dating from approximately 110 million years ago. I’m not far from the Rockey Mountains and I would like to remind Mann if and when I see salt water creeping back into this region that’s when I’m gonna start being delighted with my new beach-front property. Now that’s when I will buy my first sail first boat and install a wharf.

“So the WWF enjoyed gifts of €8,794,595 from the EU. Actually, it got more. It was a joint beneficiary on over €28million euros of EU funds, but I’ve only listed the direct payments from the EU to the WWF.

There’s a lot more. For instance, the Climate Action Network Europe received €1,514,720. in total, then, three searches reveal €13,319,560.”

And another thing – for the geologically challenged like Mann and the Team, there is one certain thing about thick sequences of water saturated soft sediments, such as are found in this North Carolina study:

They compact over time under their own weight – water gets steadily squeezed out of the sediments (the process finally ceases when they become hard rock) – hence they shrink, become less thick – to the goofy this looks like rising sea levels..

In the world of real science – this report would score an F- for cherry picking data and refusing to even consider other possible reasons for ‘the catastrophic ocean rise’.

I make no apologies for referencing this site once again here on WUWT as it gives lie to the myth of global sea-levels rising to catastrophic levels.http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/time/roman/art61315
Where the Romans originally landed in England, and where they built their first harbour is now TWO miles inland!
England, along with many other places in the world, is still recovering from the last ice age.The land is going up, the water is going down. I cannot envisage any physical yard-stick being able to differentiate between the two movements.

I’m having a ‘here we go again’ reaction to this paper. When I first got interested in MBH98, I was struck by the contrast between the really messy input data (tree ring widths) and the pristine, clean-room like precision of the output. My initial attention was drawn to two questions (1) how can you measure the width of a tree ring to a claimed precision of 1/10 the diameter of a tree cell, and (2) how can you claim to know that certain trees are suitable temperature proxies and others are not without using post hoc data selection techniques. 12 years later, no one can satisfactorily answer these basic questions.

Now with this new study, Mann and Team claim to be able to measure sea level to sub-millimeter precision using the equivalent of chicken bones and tea leaves and they do so while asserting tight error bars. This is the kind of magic act that leaves competent engineers a bit skeptical. So I’ve got some questions…

I have some fossils of sea creatures I found when hiking and camping in Utah. I found them at an altitude of 6,000 plus feet. Obviously the sea level was much higher when those creatures swam the seas than it is now. Did Mann and friends take that into consideration? When are these so called scientists going to accept the fact that the earth changes, and we have nothing to do with it.

An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.

So they did a few reconstructions in North Carolina, confirmed them with a single one done is Massachusetts, which gave them a result for the entire US Atlantic coast, which will be cited as evidence of dangerous global sea level rise, thus proof of dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming.

I await the consistent calls from the (C)AGW faithful against using regional results to claim global effects, and against “cherry picking” which seems to be broadly defined as looking at particular records instead of the entire record when addressing those presenting evidence against (severe) CO2-caused (C)AGW effects. Yep, they should start rolling in any second now…

It looks like the “North Carolina” series has an inordinate influence on the overall result. Many of the series don’t extend to the medieval warm period, and of those that have extensive data throughout the period only the North Carolina series looks like a Hockey stick. The other series, though more sparse, also appear mixed in terms of agreeing/disagreeing with the Hockey Stick series.

It is the same trick. Mann is a one trick pony. The one-trickiness of this is uncanny. This study presents all the same problems as the study behind the hockey stick. The reliability of the proxy is questionable, just as Briffa’s tree rings were questionable. The site selected is highly questionable and there is no justification offered for the selection. (In this case, the site selected is bizarre. If you know that area, you know that the top ten feet have been disturbed regularly.) The main finding flies in the face of history and recent experience, just as the hockey stick did. (If the water level had risen 2 mm per year in this century then my mother would have experienced a rise of 19% of a meter. She is quite capable of conducting a tour to the spots and demonstrating that no such rise took place. For those who have not visited those beaches, a rise of eight inches in sea level would put the foam six to eight feet farther up the gently sloping beach.)

Apparently, Mann and his team are playing the Tar Baby. They expect the same kind of criticism that they received for the original Hockey Stick and they expect to survive that criticism in the same punch drunk, snaggle tooth way once again. Their true believers will stick with them come hell or high water. It seems to me that this is not scientific publication but something entirely different, more akin to theatre, and sceptics are cast in the role of Brer Rabbit. As another pointed out, the presentation is so darned artsy. I think science is not Mann’s calling or goal.

North Carolina and other records show sea level was stable from AD 1400 until the end of the 19th century due to cooler temperatures associated with the Little Ice Age. A second increase in the rate of sea-level rise occurred around AD 1880–1920; in North Carolina the mean rate of rise was 2.1 ……………..
Let me try this………….If the sea level was stable between approx. 1400 and the end of the 19th century, why would the Dutch increase the height of the sea-dikes? I have a picture from the North of Holland indicating sea wall enhancement since 1570 to present. somehow it does not want to upload. (Help?)

The sea-level data stops 10 years ago. [comment by RHS]. The team used only tide-gauge data, ignoring satellite data. Recent data is available, is more accurate [KnR], and shows that the rate of sea-level rise has slowed and appears to have started falling. [latitude]. The team also used just one area for its sea-level, North Carolina [Al Gored], without reference to whether the land there rose or fell. [Wil]. The coastline there consists of ever-shifting sands, so is particularly unreliable for estimating sea-level. [Wade]. The N. Carolina area is actually in the far field zone of the Laurentian ice sheet, which means that it is currently falling. [Chris Hall]. Land nearby is known to be subsiding. [The Englishman].

Salt-marsh foraminifera micro fossils essentially show the rate of land erosion, not the rate of sea-level rise. [Floor Anthoni].

The graphs show sea-levels rising throughout several hundred years of cooling, yet the paper claims a consistent link between temperature and global sea-level. [stumpy].

The acceleration in sea level rise occurred between 1865 and 1892… When it jumped from -0.1 mm/yr to 2.1 mm/yr. Meaning that the acceleration in sea level rise started long before atmospheric CO levels climbed above the low 300′s. [David Middleton]

The rate of sea-level rise is quoted as 2mm per year. That is ony 2m in 1,000 years. [Foxgoose]. (I would also note that the Colorado Uni sea-level data shows sea-level rise of more than 3mm per year in the 20th century.)

The supplemental information for the paper is full of divergences and exclusions. [Steven Mosher]. (I would also add that it is full of uncertainties.)

The paper did not have to be subjected to normal peer-review. [MarcH].

And I haven’t got to the end of the comments yet – let alone new ones coming in as I typed. Apologies to anyone whose pertinent comment I missed.

To quote jv
“Looks like Mann’s modeling software is good for all kinds of things. Add air you get a hockey stick shaped warming graph, add water and you get a hockey stick shaped sea level rise. I suspect he is selling the idea that if you add enough money you can get a hockey stick shaped stock market graph as well.”

Ah: so that’s where he got them from. Let’s see: here’s an experiment we can directly measure:
– start buying shares, now. Sit on them. There will be an oopsy-daisy up and down around 2017 (the end of the first, smaller “hockeystick”) with a short recession until 2020 but we stay on the roller coaster maybe buying more shares over this period. Then we sit, riding the second larger hockey stick, and sell ALL over the last quarter 2025.

The Englishman says: June 20, 2011 at 12:45 pm
“It is a pretty good bet that land subsidence in the North Carolina coastal plain is due to heavy pumping of ground water from aquifers referred to in various places in these web pages, namely the Black Creek and Upper Cape Fear aquifers.”

Looks the same hockey stick as in Venice , Italy

“Venice was built on marshlands, a sedimentary island within a lagoon off the coast of Italy. Attila the Hun invaded Italy in 452, forcing many inhabitants to flee to the coast. A small group of islands in the center of a lagoon were collectively called Rivo Alto, or “high bank.” The area soon expanded, and Ri’Alto became the center of Venice.

Venice has always been slowly sinking. Over the last 1,000 years, it has sunk by around seven centimeters for every century, but recent reports have stated that in the last century alone, the city of Venice has lowered by around 24 centimeters. This may have more to do with global warming and the melting polar ice caps than with Venice sinking into its own foundations.”

Six hundred years ago, Venetians protected themselves from land-based attacks by diverting all the major rivers flowing into the lagoon and thus preventing sediment from filling the area around the city. This created an ever-deeper lagoon environment.

During the 20th century, when many artesian wells were sunk into the periphery of the lagoon to draw water for local industry, Venice began to subside. It was realised that extraction of water from the aquifer was the cause. The sinking has slowed markedly since artesian wells were banned in the 1960s.Some recent studies have suggested that the city is no longer sinking.

And after all that work (harde har har) and fuss (omg) one can still walk to the beach and not notice anything going on over the course of a lifetime. Silly Millimeters/Silly Mann. Of one thing we can be certain of: The certainties are robustly uncertain. Assume.

Thanx, Tallbloke, I’d missed that. Good question… when will Mann produce his mosquito paper? $1.8 million would translate into a couple of thousand hours of research. Maybe it’s on hold because he can’t get a hockey stick out of it.

Is there any way of finding out who actually peer reviewed this paper? (I know it’s supposed to be kept under wraps – but would anyone here like to be charged with having to ‘pass’ this work – and more importantly, would said reviewers be happy to be tarred with the same brush?)
Honestly, I think reviewers should be given as much, if not more hassle, as the author(s) when something is shown to be wrong/misleading/etc, etc – after all – aren’t they supposed to be doing a ‘proper’ job and checking the work?

How is 30 year smoothing done on the end points?
If the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass, are the coasts near greenland showing a lowering of sea level as should be expected, due to gravitational forces?

How does the temperature hockey stick, which is known to be faulty, reinforce the validity of a sea level hockey stick? Two wrongs apparently do make a right.

I have real doubts about the data obtained beneath the water in North Carolina for the obvious reasons. That land is low lying, often soft and swampy, often disturbed or rearranged by storms, and recently frequently remodeled by man. Another proxy should have been chosen. I also doubt the accuracy of the dating techniques to such fine resolution. I almost appears that he used his temperature hockey stick to calibrate seal level proxies. I also find it odd that, during the LIA, when cooling occurred, there was no corresponding drop in sea level according to his proxy. Isn’t that a bit of a problem?

I thought that some actual statisticians, some time ago, showed that by mis-application, statistics could make hockey-sticks out of any data set, even phone numbers from any phone book. Without even any need to cherry-pick.

The British Admiralty charts have been digitized and are widely available to verify or disprove sea level change. They can be displayed on a computer using widely available charting software. These are reproductions of hand drawn charts of the oceans of the earth, drawn during the golden age of discovery before the age of industrialization.

The depths along the coast lines were drawn to an accuracy of 1 foot by men largely in wooden rowboats, using weighted sounding lines dropped over the side. The charts show who did the survey, the year, and the ship they sailed on. Many of the names are well known from history. The weighted lines used a wax plug on the end to collect samples of the bottom, and the charts tell you if it is sandy, muddy, rocky, etc. The charts also show incredible detail ashore, with mountains and streams marked, with forest and swamps and grasslands drawn in.

In many respects the work that went into these charts meets of exceeds the technological achievements of NASA in the exploration of space. These charts were by and large the charts used by all countries of the world, including the US when they created their own mapping agencies. If the charts were later resurveyed, this will be noted along with the date.

Locate one of these charts for your area. The depths are almost always drawn in reference to low low tide. This will be noted on the charts. What is noteworthy is that they don’t say “adjusted to correct for sea level change”.

Go out at low low tide. If there has been sea level rise, then the drying rocks shown on the charts should no longer be drying. they should be covered. You are looking for a symbol that looks like a cross with a dot between each of the arms of the cross. See how many of these are still there today. Each one is evidence that sea level rise, even after recovery from the LIA and 150 years of industrialization is not significant. There are tens of thousands of such rocks on the Admiralty Charts from around the world. Any meaningful survey of global sea level rise should start with these rocks, as they are by far the most accurate and extensive record on earth of pre-industrial sea levels.

But of course these surveys will not be done, as they will not prove that what is wanted. The research being done is not to establish to truth, but rather to collect evidence to “prove” sea levels are rising. Any evidence that shows the opposite will be discarded – the exact opposite of how science is supposed to be conducted.

Imagine that you were on trial for murder and the police found 2 sets of finger prints on the murder weapon. Yours and someone else. However, they discarded the second set of finger prints, and reported to the courts and the press that your finger prints were found on the murder weapon. This is climate science. Only the evidence that convicts is being reported. The evidence that something else might be responsible is discarded.

Lots of comments & havent read them all so sorry if someone has already stated the obvious below:

1) The authors explicitly state the inflection point to higher sea level rate begins between 1865-1892
2) This pre-dates any significant increase in CO2 from industrialization
3) I conclude that this is conclusive evidence that this change in rate of sea level must have a natural cause
4) The global temp record appears to tie the sea level curve fairly well at first glance – it is reasonable to assume they are related via thermal expansion of water (I am sure someone could do that calculation & see if they tie)
5) Given point 4 & point 3, it seems obvious that any change in global temps over the last 100 + years also must be driven primarily by natural causes.

Seems to me this paper pretty much kills CO2 as the dominant force in global temp changes, given the timing of on set of sea level change.

This feels a lot like Al Gore pointing out the correlation between CO2 & temps from ice core data, but failing to recognize that temps rose before CO2 – good correlation, wrong conclusion.

Obviously, plenty of posters have brought up potential technical problems. I am sure that will be a discussion that will go on for years; I will let other expand on that.

I have to say I feel a bit sorry for Mann – it really wouldn’t matter what he did research-wise from this point forward. He will be discredited out of hand by many for his past problems, regardless if this is solid work or not. That is obvious reading the comments on here. He should probably consider a career change.

So……. the temperature during the “Medieval Climate Anomoly” was within 0.3 degrees celcius of current values (plus or minus 0.2 degrees) with no explanation as to why the temp was that high a thousand years ago.

Then….. the temperature during the Little Ice Age was 1 degree celcius below current values with no explanation as to why the temp was so low then.

And…. we are instructed that both temperature and sea level began thier inexorable rise in the mid to late 1800 hundreds, prior to any possible influence from human generated CO2.

So even if I accepted the methodology and conclusions (which at this point I don’t) it would seem that we have, at best, an exposition of natural variability in climate. The study gives absolutely no joy to those who promote AGW as it really is a case of premature uptick.

Everybody knows that the Pacific island of Tuvalu is sinking. Al Gore told us that the inhabitants are invading New Zealand because of it.

“Around 1990 it became obvious that the local tide-gauge did not agree — there was no evidence of ‘sinking.’ So scientists at Flinders University, Adelaide, were asked to check whether this was true. They set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands, including Tuvalu, confident that they would show that all of them are sinking.

“Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose.”

I found at least one major problem already with the temperature data. Mann did not use the available HADCrutv3 data. It appears that he had a 0.5C offset in the data. Might be a splicing issue, but the offset is real from the available data.

After the hottest decade on the record, tied hottest year on the record, Greenland meltdown, glacial Armageddon, Antarctic ice sheets melting, snowfalls a thing of the past – sea level rate rise in decline.

I really wouldn’t go using the Kent coastline and Richborough Roman fort as evidence of sea level falling since Roman times – Richborough was on the end of the Wantsum Chanel, which gradually silted up and vanished in about the 16thC, partly due to land use change, improved drainage but mostly due to natural silting. There’s plenty of evidence of old jetties etc – in Sarre for example, which is miles from the sea now, there was a ferry crossing in the 1400’s. Look where it is on a map – its on the end of the Thames and is massively influenced by silt from the river and the tides from the sea (the famous Goodwin sands aren’t far away) – there’s massive erosion and transport happening on that spot of the coast.

Ross says:
June 20, 2011 at 5:30 pm
“Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose.”
==============================================================================
Ross,
Steven posted tide gauges from that same area and used it to show how satellite sea level data is crap…….
..his words lol

“During a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years. There was then a second period of stable sea level associated with a cooler period, known as the Little Ice Age, which persisted until the late 19th century.”

Were these events global? In his interview, Phil Jones said:
“There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not.”

Would the team be interested in doing a similar study in the southern hemisphere to answer this question?

Could we put together a list of conundrums that the proponents of AGW need to resolve before there would be any degree of credibility in that paper? For example, the shoreline for the Viking Settlements in Greenland and eastern Canada compared to the present sea level. Or Sir James Clark Ross’s sea level mark in Tasmania?

Jeff Carlson says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:13 pm
So now Mann says there was a MWP ? Its so confusing …

Convenient, huh? Like it when it serves ya, don’t like when it d’un’t.

A forminifera (2 mm) can detect a (2 mm) sea level rise? Mighty interesting. While plankton can indicate marine zonation on a geologic time scale, HTF can the MWP, now elevated to convenient star status, be resolved? Quick…time to look into Foraminiferaproximal behavior!

This historical rate of rise was greater than any other persistent, century-scale trend during the past 2100 y.

I think the optimal word here is “persistent”.

If you notice the boxes get smaller and smaller as you move closer to the present…ie the averages of the far past are averaged over longer periods of time and as you get closer to the present the averages shrink to cover smaller periods.

So as you get closer to the present you get more of the “grainy” ups and downs. There very well could have been huge rises and drops in the past but they would not be seen because the “grain” has been lost due to longer periods of averages….but they show up closer to the present.

It looks like Mann has found a new trick….though it probably is not hiding a decline so much as exaggerating the rise by hiding past fluctuations.

You can be sure that governments around the world will seize upon this, no matter how ridiculous. I’m sure our Australian Labor Party will use it as justification for its proposed carbon tax and see North Carolina marshes as being far more relevant than our local tides gauges at Fort Denison, which show a mean sea level rise of 6 cm over the past 100 years.http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70000/IDO70000_60370_SLI.shtml

It’s telling that he only used two sites in N Carolina, with all the data he had access to:

“…The study, “Atlantic hurricanes and climate over the past 1,500 years,” gathered results from existing sediment studies from lagoons from the Caribbean and Gulf Coast to New England to determine land-falling hurricane activity over the past 1,500 years. The studies measured fine layers of sand that overwashed beaches into lagoons during hurricanes…”

“…Here we place recent activity in a longer-term context by comparing two independent estimates of tropical cyclone activity over the past 1,500 years. The first estimate is based on a composite of regional sedimentary evidence of landfalling hurricanes, while the second estimate uses a previously published statistical model of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity driven by proxy reconstructions of past climate changes…”

Joshua Corning may have a valid point; Manns’s graph could be logarithmic in nature. It’ll be an easy check.
The issue of using modern plant distributions as a yardstick should also be examined for validity. Uniformitarianism is a cosy paradigm; shame that it’s a crock.

So esturine “sea-level” is not dependant on run-off from inland weather events, flood surges, sea and precipitation induced coastal erosion, ocean current changes, up-stream landslides and soil erosion, modern agricultural and land use changes, tectonics…. just like Mr. Mann I’m no geologist either but it seems that you could shoot holes in sediment-as-a-proxy for anything but, well, sediment. Or have I missed the point?

Some time ago I started looking at sea levels, using tidal gauge info, to see how it correlated to temperature. The So. & East coast of the US was chosen, since that seemed to have the least seismic activity, including uplift. I would have preferred the East coast of S. America, but the data records were not as good as US records. Looking at the records, noted in the figure below:

seven stations were selected, to form a composite anomaly. These included Galveston, Pensacola, Key West, Charleston, Baltimore, Atlantic City & New York. The composite was filtered with a 10 yr. Fourier filter, and compared a Trend line:

It was noted that, after ~1915, the trend line held fairly close to the filtered composite, in spite of increasing CO2. The HadCRUT3 global anomaly was also included as a comparison

The anomaly of each site was computed (1969-1999 base) & a composite average was formed for each year. The data set was then filtered with a 50 yr. Fourier Convolution filter, and compared to the CO2 Mauna Loa & Law Dome (DE08 & De08-2) ice core data.

The result is shown below:

Since all the long term temperature data was taken from central & western Europe, the HadCRUT3_NH anomaly was also included.

A few items noted were:
On a long term basis, there was little CO2 change, while Europe went through some temperature swings, comparable to the present.

While the Ave14 & HadCRUT3_NH seem to follow each other (especially the post 1900 rise, 1940 dip & subsequent rise), CO2 seems to have little correlation.

Ave14 seems to lead the HadCRUT3_NH curve by about 10 years, so we may be in for a NH dip, or are already in it.

That’s the most pathetic excuse for “science” I have seen since Mann’s last hockey-stick paper. He pretends that this one place on the Carolina coast is important and indicative, he refuses to use data from the last ten years, he never looks at the geology to see if there are know subsidence problems, he never compares his data to satellite measurements and he doesn’t produce enough of his data-massaging to make a judgment on validity.

My high school physics teacher would give him an F on this homework. Mann has to learn that BS is no substitute for real science.

Dag nabbit !! I still can’t use pasted to put stuff in the comments box.

Note #2

Now, wait just a second. No part of North Carolina was covered by a glacier within
the past 18,000 years. We <i. can't be talking about isostatic uplift or subsidence
of this North Carolina region that has any reason or need to be somehow
compensated for in sea level calculations.

I know our corner of northeasten Ohio has been going through a slow isostatic
uplift, A.K.A. a “Glacial Isostatic Adjustment” for at least the past 10,000 years.
All that means is the land is several hundred feet higher in altitute (relative
only to the current sea level) than it was a couple thousand years ago. It
means the water from Lake Erie flows a bit faster in Lake Ontario. What goes
down the Ohio River watershed gets to the Mississippi River faster than it
did centuries ago. But the rise in land level doesn’t increase the amount
of water reaching the Atlantic throught the Saint Lawrence River. It doesn’t
add to the amount of water flowing down the Mississippi and dumping into
the Gulf of Mexico either.

To credit any type of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (whether it’s a rebound
or a subsidence) t the Atlantic shore regions of North Carolina is superficially
unrealistic or, at worst, deliberately deceptive and misleading.

(14) Peltier,W.R. Global sea level rise…, 1996, Geophysical Letters.
Nowhere in the regular text is there any mention of a sea level rise
at the North Carolia shore, nor is there a specific citation footnoted in the
text for this “rise”.

However, See Figure 5 of this paper, especially the note
within the Figure 5 box which contains the comment that the Mid-Atalntic
shores (which would include North Carolina) seem to reflect roughlytwice the global SRL norms.

Additionally, the Peltier paper distinguishes the differences between
using geological and a geophysical to measure any sea
level rise. The Kemp, Horton, Mann et al. paper above doesn’t differentiate
between the two methods, and doesn’t specially state which method they’re
using.

This study includes the following: [ Golly, I wish I could paste this in ! ]

For the gauges with the longest record, there is a geographical bias with
many more records in the Northern Hemisphere (particularly the North
Atlantic) than in the Southern Hemisphere. Cabanes et al (2001)
suggest this geographical bias resulted in significant overestimate of
twentieth century sea level rise. To date no sea level rise has been
detected for the twentieth century (Woodworth 1990, Douglas
1992) although the longest records do indicate an increase in the rate
of sea level rise over the last two or three centuries (Woodworth 1999).

(15) Engelhart,S.E., Horton, B.P.,Peltier & Tonqvist, 2009. This paper
specifically includes the specious GIA “subsidence” in North Carolina in
their calculations for the sea level rise (SLR) for that stat’e shoreline
and by inference, the entire U.S. East Coast.

Use of Mann’s 2008 temperature reconstruction seemed rather weak (if not entirely foolish). The statistical analysis seems a bit hinky to me, but I do not possess the expertise to challenge it.

+++++++++

If you are referring to the Dec 08 paper, it was dissected within 10 days of publication showing the trickery used to again suppress the magnitude of the MWP temperatures. The method used was to carefully select from a wide range of proxies, data that would give hockey stick-ish shapes while not being so wildly inaccurate as to place the confidence index at lower than 95%.

Using a filter mechanism, he selected enough data sets that when average, produced a 95% confidence index, but which still gave a suppressed MWP and an elevated modern era temperature. The paper discusses how he eliminated (undesirable) data sets and kept others.

As I recall the dissection looked at what happened if all the data, or the best data, or the most detailed data were used instead. The MWP reappears (as per usual) and the suppression of the MWP is lifted.

You will notice in the MM08 paper there is a lot of emphasis on the confidence index. He was playing the ‘95%’ card which is to say that by convention, something with a statistical confidence index of 95% is considered to be considered ‘true’ scientifically. The trick was to find data set selection criteria that would meet the double need for 95% confidence and a hockey stick shape. I was surprised that he put his name to a study that had such a hump of an MWP because it is much more pronounced that the 1998 paper where it was all but not there. Quite a climb down.

“Sea level in North Carolina was reconstructed using transfer functions
relating the distribution of salt-marsh foraminifera to tidal elevation (7, 12).
Application of transfer functions to samples from two cores (at sites 120 km
apart) of salt-marsh sediment provided estimates of PME with uncertainties
of <0.1 m. …"

From reading the study, I’m sorry but I fail to see the correlation between foraminifera and sea level. Can anyone explain the so-called “transfer functions”?

Floor Anthoni says:
June 20, 2011 at 1:45 pm

Measuring sea levels with salt-marsh foraminifera micro fossils is quite a sensitive and valid method to measure the depth of the sea bottom in the past. We should not, therefore suspect fraud in the data. However, this technique does not measure sea level, but marsh bottom instead. It is well known that marshes have been in-filling in modern times due to sedimentation from accelerated land erosion. What this report in essence measures, is the rate of land erosion, which has very little to do with sea level rise. That this fact is omitted from the paper may be called fraud.

This sounds like a much more credible explanation of the observed data. Thanks for the cogent argument.

I don’t disagree that it’s deliberately deceptive and misleading regarding what normal people think the sea level is, but from the reading I’ve done on this, my understanding is that the frauds are saying that the capacity of the oceans has increased, hence the GIA.

It’s probably a trial balloon that the frauds are flying, to see if the sheeple and otherwise dumbsnip unwashed masses will fall for a CNFA (cloud negative feedback adjustment), and a GCRA (galactic cosmic ray adjustment), amongst many other adjustments, that they will then apply to arrive at the “REAL” global temperature RISE/CRISIS.

In other words – Your thermometers may actually read the same or less, but CO2 is a greenhouse gas so …. blah blah snipping blah …..

I want ao take one step away from my Notes 1 & 2 above, as poorly formatted
as they have been, and toss an off-the-wall politcal comment into the ring:

This paper appears to be yet another part of the recent effort
to make Mike Mann’s original hockey stick, and subsequesnt Team studies which
include it’s data and/or conclusions even more critical to the academic,
scientific and political communities.

There are still petitions and letters circulating to challenge the FOI request
under court order at the University of Virginia, and another batch trying quash
the Virginia Attorney General’s inquiry.

Here in Ohio it’s now being proposed that our State University system be given
new leeway in NOT having to comply with our state’s Freedom of Informaton
Act and parts or our Open Meeting Act (ORC 121.22)

The sponsors don’t SAY this is in reaction to Mike Mann’s situation at the
University of Virginia, or that it’s even a response to the recent Ohio State/NCAA
sports program problems with it’s own little e-mail scandal.

Watch for more of these hide-the-sausage tactics between now and the end
of August.

I’m underwhelmed. Data splicing in the temperature record, cutting off data at 2000 AD, wide error bars, focusing on a few locations, high past variability, use of models, AND a change point that falls well before high industrial fossil fuel burning. My expectations of this paper are very low.

Should plot CO2 concentration from 1800 to 2011.5 vs sea level. You will see sea level rise started nearly 100 years before significant CO2 increase. Also during the 2000s the sea level and CO2 diverge once again. Bogus science once again by Mann’s team.

Luckily, the 2008 Mann inverted-proxy temp. reconstruction didn’t overlap the neatly grafted instrumental temp., much less diverge a little later, eh? At least he didn’t use that last 70 yr. period of man – caused sediment erosion this time to “help” the remainder turn up to fit the instrumental?

Also, apples to oranges aside, my lying eyes tell me A to B that prior to the “Summary” reconstruction, proxy + instrumental [huh?] of N. Carolina, the original reconstructed sea levels, without instrumental, increase even when reconstructed temps.are stable or decrease, so we’re in one helluva mess.

At 2 mm/yr. as of 2000 it might be hard for coast dwellers to even get much of a head start on the coming CAGW Apocalypse, so I’m recommending they just get their affairs in order and put the documents in wax sealed bottles – and hope that the end of 1860 – 2000 flattening of sea level rise has continued to date. Otherwise, they’re libel to think they’re already under water.

@- Jim Barker says:
June 20, 2011 at 4:32 pm
“I thought that some actual statisticians, some time ago, showed that by mis-application, statistics could make hockey-sticks out of any data set, even phone numbers from any phone book. Without even any need to cherry-pick.”

True, but the size of the ‘hockey stick’ blade produced by such mathematical missapplication is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the rise found in the actual data.

“The Dieppe maps are a set of maps produced in Dieppe, France in the 16th century, thought to provide clues towards the Portuguese exploration of Australia’s east coast two hundred years before Captain Cook and even earlier than the first confirmed sighting of Australia by Jansz in his 1606 expedition along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The maps show part of what might be Queensland, and name the land mass “Java a Grande “”

This map shows clearly Hervey Bay and Fraser Island and the smaller islands in Hervey Bay.

On my living room wall hangs, framed, two 19th century maps of Hervey Bay used by my Great Grandfather. The serveys were done by Captain Owen Stanley, and Matthew Flinders, and these 2 maps show the smaller islands in Hervey Bay as well.

Duck, Picnic, and Little Woody Islands are today are less than a meter above the high water mark.

Further, in my 67 years of fishing and collecting bait along the foreshore, I have not seen any change. I still collect shell fish for bait from the same rocks as I did 60 years ago.

My Question is, if the seas have gone up and down as much as we are led to believe, how come these low lying islands still exist after 500 years and seemingly unchanged.

Also, doesn’t the team say there is a ~30 year lag between when the CO2 is released into the environment and the time the warming shows up? I believe that’s the rational for why even if we stop emitting CO2 today we are going to be doomed to another 30+ years of ever increasing warming. Thus, since there is lag between CO2 release and temperature increase, should compensate the CO2 vs sea level graph by offsetting the CO2 rise by 30 years as well.

Well, it’s easy to see why they wanted the help of the world-renowned statistician and signal analysis expert Michael Mann, especially if they were looking for a result that was spectacularly alarming thus highly noteworthy. Mann is well known for finding rock-solid definitive signals in noisy data. He’s so good, he could find a rattlesnake in the noise from a tire leaking air.

Where are the unconformities in these cores? In both cores, the average rate of accumulation of peat is 1 mm per year. It is beyond belief that these 1.5 and 3 meter stacks of muddy peat remained undisturbed by wildlife for 3000 years. A single turtle scooping out a nest or a heron chasing dinner would easily displace 2 inches of peat — oops there goes 50 years of data….

Where are the hurricane storm surges? I’m not asking much: One Cat 4+ hit every 50 years on average. That means there should be over 40 of them in each core.

The C14 error bars in Fig. 1 average about 200 years. These are likely not instrumentation problems. They are probably more indicitive of the degree of bioturbation of the peat. every layer of the core is a churned mix of the top 20 cm of peat. Instead of a nice undisturbed tree core to analyze tree rings, the authors are faced with trying to make dendochron sense from a pile of sawdust turned into press board.

Core B, btw 1.45 and 1.15 m (30 cm) spans according to the C14 data about 900 years, so the RSL rate is only 1/3 of the average. They couldn’t bring themselves to change the slope of their line from 300 to 1200 AD, which would probabably point to a fall in GIA after correcting for subsidence.. They could only increase their error band. You sure don’t see and change in slope in Fig 2 RSL plot — nice and straight, constand rate of change.

Do we have another instance of “hiding in plain sight”? Core B (Turning Point) on Fig 2 RSL has a minimum date of 800 AD. But if you go back to the B chart of Fig 1, the minimum error bar goes to 600 AD. But if you honor the C14 data, you ought to carry it left to about 300 AD. Interesting that the RSL graph inset (B) sits atop where these earlier data points for Core B should plot, say 400 AD at RSL 1.4 m. The curves would not look like the agree so well any more.

“Apparently, Mann and his team are playing the Tar Baby. They expect the same kind of criticism that they received for the original Hockey Stick and they expect to survive that criticism in the same punch drunk, snaggle tooth way once again. Their true believers will stick with them come hell or high water. It seems to me that this is not scientific publication but something entirely different, more akin to theatre, and sceptics are cast in the role of Brer Rabbit. As another pointed out, the presentation is so darned artsy. I think science is not Mann’s calling or goal.”

Just another brick in the wall of evidence that Michael Mann is more concerned with producing disinformation than in doing science. But what about his co-authors? This is garbage from the gitgo on so many levels than it leaves you wondering why all the whores are gathering in the food court.
============================

This paper is utter pap and yet another example to those with open minds of the nonsense that Team AGW is spouting. Once again they rely on the laughable Church and White tide gauge data which has never been corroborated by any other researcher. The proxies they use do not corroborate with each other but nevertheless they have somehow managed to come up with a linear trend. The two sites they have chosen do not corroborate each other but somehow they have concluded they are a model for the rest of the globe. To achieve this astounding result they had to give all the data to a person who is known not for his ability as a statistician but because of his involvement in highly contraversial analysis techniques, despite recent advice that this kind of data should in fact be analysed by proper statistiticians.

If this research was given to me by a student I would simply throw it back in his face. It is lazy and ill-conceived and appears to have been thrown together deliberately in order to support a pre-determined outcome.

It doesn’t surprise me that Penn State is involved in this fiasco again, but what does surprise me that other reputable scientists are so willing to sit back and watch this kind of dreadful hysterical tripe be publised without so much as raising their eyebrows. Meanwhile those that do stand up to attack this kind of bullshit are branded as “dangerous deniers” that put the lives of millions at risk and have their reputations trashed in the mass media.

“tallbloke says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:53 pm
According to Manns new sea level curve, the Romans built inland ports in southern England.

WUWT?”

I think Mann may have misinterpreted a telephone conversation with Jones, where reference was made to the Cinque Ports, which of course, hadn’t sank at all, but rather had been left high and dry by receding tides.
Another example of the vagaries of our common language, enhanced by the English predilection for borrowing words from our continental neighbours.

Hmmm. Isn’t that interesting. I’ve just scrolled through the comments and I didn’t notice any trolls defending this paper.

Should I be pleased you no longer consider me a troll?

I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking and particularly wirth the guy who seemed to think that two photographs somehow prove that the 4 inches or so of warming claimed for the last 50 yesars an’t possibly have happened.

I have a serious question for you all: Irrespective of what you think of Mann et al, why do “regular commentators” here not call each other on obvious nonsense like that? It would strengthen your case if you did.

Chris from Hervey Bay echoes my earlier opinion. If the sea level really is rising over time, we MUST see it happen. Yet there is anecdotal evidence from many of little change over 50, 100, 150 years. I have no particular axe to grind – if it’s rising so be it. But where is the practical evidence? I would be most interested in a website where people from all over the world can post details of their own experiences, either for or against. Rather than statistical manipulation and proxy projections, we could get a first hand account of what is really happening.

The bottom line is that it matters not if the sea level is rising, the land is falling, somewhere is rebounding or whatever, the risk facing humanity has to be something solid. Where in the world do we see strong evidence of a rapidly increasing sea level? I have no idea, I am only talking of my own personal experience. But it seems others have this same experience.

On many beaches as has been pointed out, a 6 inch rise will represent feet of difference in terms of high water marks, so it must show up.

This guy opened his mouth again and proved he is a data manipulator working backwards from his bosses suggested answer. His income is derived from his scientific credentials that have been shattered by his own petty ego driven hacked emails. This is so laughable it’s silly. It’s clear this work is based on cherry picked data smoothed and adjusted to support the answer already disproved. Sad.

Ryan : The situation on which you comment : “It doesn’t surprise me that Penn State is involved in this fiasco again, but what does surprise me that other reputable scientists are so willing to sit back and watch this kind of dreadful hysterical tripe be publised without so much as raising their eyebrows.” is explained in your next sentence : “Meanwhile those that do stand up to attack this kind of bullshit are branded as “dangerous deniers” that put the lives of millions at risk and have their reputations trashed in the mass media.“.

Retired scientists have been easier to find in the ranks of the sceptics than scientists who still have to earn a living. The tipping-point we all desperately need is the latter gaining critical mass. Until then, I suspect the IPCC and their fellow travellers can continue to promote their fraud, flout conflict-of-interest concerns, etc, with impunity.

“If anything, the sea level seems to be less now as king tides in the 70s often caused water to flood onto the esplanade which I don’t think it does now. Now I could be wrong, but anecdotally at least I see no difference at all.”

———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Graeme, the king tides in January / February, still flood over onto the esplanade at Urangan, especially if the North easterly breeze gets behind the tide. Over the last 7 or so years, much work has been done to protect the new resorts that have been built along the foreshore. The sand flats have been graded back to the frontal dunes and made them higher, and a new rock and concrete wall was built at Urangan.
Still the board walks at the Great Sandy Straits marina go under at the high tides in Jan. / Feb. Like I said above, I haven’t seen any change in 67 years, and I had been away for 50 of those years.

The eastern seaboard is a passive continental margin that is subsiding at variable rates locally.

Long­Term Sea­Level and Dynamic Topography of the Eastern United States

David Rowley argued that the results obtained from mantle flow simulations show that eustatic sea-level cannot be derived from continental margins because of the influence of dynamic topography. For the Eastern coast of the United States, variations of the sea-level only represent local variations. Other authors (e.g. Müller et al, 2008;
Spasojevic et al., 2008) came to the same conclusion as Rowley while using Miller et al. (2005) data taken from an assumed passive margin in New Jersey thought to represent eustatic sea-level. They both used a mantle convection model and came to the conclusion that the discrepancies between their results and those of Miller et al. (2005) could be explained by dynamic topography.

David Rowley has been a professor and faculty member at the University of Chicago since 1993, his current research deals with mantle dynamics related to dynamic topography, modelling of global plate kinematics with links to geodynamics, long-term sea level variation, and reconstructing global paleogeographic evolution.

Back in the late nineties when he first freaked out over bleached coral, the GBR was all doomed to rapid bleaching which you guessed it hasn’t happened. We got the same alarmist story with the Crown of Thorns Starfish ‘plague’ (which if you’re a starfish thrills you no end that your stars are on the rise) which was all mankind’s fault naturally enough (phosphate fertiliser runoff as I recall). They ate a lot of coral for a while (they leave it ‘bleached’ too) and then their numbers dropped off through too much cholestorol in their diet or something. Ove continues to get an allergic reaction to colourless, odourless gases as well as humans who are impervious to such mild reagents.

“I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking and particularly wirth the guy who seemed to think that two photographs somehow prove that the 4 inches or so of warming claimed for the last 50 yesars an’t possibly have happened.”

I don’t think the photos were offered as proof. Rather, they were offered as testimony from someone who knows the beach well and who sees them as consistent with his experience of the beach. I can offer photos of Daytona Beach from 1957 that show the high and low water marks in exactly the same places as now, but the actual evidence is my experience of the beach.

Independent of my belief that tying the North Carolina coastline (a barrier island, salt marsh ecosystem) SLR directly to Global Warming without considering other causes such as land use, dredging, sea grass mortality, fresh water erosion, hurricanes, etc. is naive, the NC Sea-Level Assessment Report of 2010 (not the study headlining this post) clearly states that predictions of future SLR are based on the ASSUMPTION that the rate of Global Warming over the next 90-years will “accelerate”, and therefore so will the “consequent” SLR in NC. They provide a range of SLR based on three “acceleration” scenarios. If acceleration of global warming , as the sole causal factor, does not occur then all bets are off. Moreover, I have not verified this but if no global warming has occurred in the last decade, and Sea Level in NC is still rising, then the stated causal relationship link is broken.

The Report states:

“It is important to understand that the curves were generated using a constant acceleration rate to reach the selected endpoints derived from the literature, and are not projections of actual sea level at specific future dates.”

There was a WUWT comment thread a while back that did something like what you suggest. There were a number of detailed personal accounts spanning 50 years or so (e.g. a stairway built down to the sea, I think near Sydney, whose relation to the water level hadn’t changed in 50 years or so). Like some of the observations made on this thread, it was quite impressive. Steven Goddard has also fished up some photos of low-lying Pacific islands that have much the same appearance since WWII, I think.

Anyway, by now the real question may be, What are these guys actually up to? Do they really believe what they are saying? Are they in some sort of race against time? Are they hoping that if they keep talking/publishing people won’t notice how cool it is outside these days? (It is where I am.)

Graeme M says:
June 21, 2011 at 4:27 am
“On many beaches as has been pointed out, a 6 inch rise will represent feet of difference in terms of high water marks, so it must show up. Mustn’t it?”

In addition to high water marks, on popular public beaches, such as Daytona Beach, there are structures built in the surf that have been in place for all or most of the 20th century. There are lots of people who adore those beaches and who would be aware of changes in sea level.

I do not mean to oppose science with anecdote. However, it is the responsibility of the scientist to explain discrepancies between his claims about sea level rise and what everyone else observes on the beach. Magnitudes are important. If you are claiming a sea level rise of one-fifth of a meter per century (2 mm per year for a 100 years), you have to explain why people who lived through most of that century and continue to visit the beach cannot detect any rise at all.

In the matter of ordinary people’s observations of sea level rise, there is a serious conceptual problem that the Warmista must address. If a rise of six inches over a century is undetectable by a person who was at the site for 95 of those years, then why should we expect a rise of two feet to be detectable? If a rise of two feet is not detectable, then why should we care about it? At some point, the scientist who wants to be believed must address the experience of the ordinary citizen.

“I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking and particularly wirth the guy who seemed to think that two photographs somehow prove that the 4 inches or so of warming claimed for the last 50 yesars an’t possibly have happened.

I have a serious question for you all: Irrespective of what you think of Mann et al, why do “regular commentators” here not call each other on obvious nonsense like that? It would strengthen your case if you did.”

OK. Since you ask, I will answer. But I only answer your question to avoid the possibility that infrequent visitors to this site may be misled by an apparent inability to answer your pioints.

Firstly, as you admit (in the same post) you are considered as being a resident troll by people who often debate in threads of WUWT. Hence, you are ignored (indeed, your post that I am answering says Bob Tisdale did not count your posts as troll ‘invasion’).

Secondly, your posts are usually – and in this case, certainly – so blatantly mistaken that there is no point in answering them: all readers of normal inteligence can see the errors for themselves.

Thirdly, in this case you conflate a reported personal experience (i.e. “the guy” who reported “two photographs”) with serious consideration of Mann’s ‘cherry picking’. And you use that ridiculous conflation as part of your attempt to assert that the paper (i.e. the subject of this thread) did not ‘cherry pick’ the data it analysed.

Fourthly, your claim that the paper does not ‘cherry pick’ is ridiculous. It does, and it does it flagrantly. Ryan gave an exposition of this as part of his post at June 21, 2011 at 3:07 am (i.e. before your post which posed the question I am answering): His excellent post says the following (among other good points):

“The proxies they use do not corroborate with each other but nevertheless they have somehow managed to come up with a linear trend. The two sites they have chosen do not corroborate each other but somehow they have concluded they are a model for the rest of the globe. To achieve this astounding result they had to give all the data to a person who is known not for his ability as a statistician but because of his involvement in highly contraversial analysis techniques, despite recent advice that this kind of data should in fact be analysed by proper statistiticians.”

In other words, they chose data sets that approximated their assertion then adjusted the data they chose in a manner that enhanced the assertion. And he could have added that they did not use the most recent data from the data sets they chose and that (n.b not used) most recent data does not fit their aseertion.

So, I offer you some friendly advice: be a good little resident troll and stop asking questions which draw attention to your posts because such attention does not enhance your credibility.

“On my living room wall hangs, framed, two 19th century maps of Hervey Bay used by my Great Grandfather. The serveys were done by Captain Owen Stanley, and Matthew Flinders, and these 2 maps show the smaller islands in Hervey Bay as well.”

Those charts would likely have been done either in 1838-43 or 1847-50 and will show drying rocks marked with crosses and dots. Very likely these same rocks will still be drying rocks at low low water, more than 150 years after they were charted. According to the alarmist theories of AGW, these rocks should all be underwater.

No one makes wholesale adjustments to navigation charts for for “sea level rise”. It would be the equivalent of murder. Only after an area is resurveyed are new soundings recorded. The area be clearly marked as resurveyed along with the year. Given the scale of the undertaking, relatively few areas on earth have been resurveyed since the British Admiralty charts were drawn. The cost is prohibitive.

Charts are marked with datum corrections, such as WGS84. This gives you and adjustment for GPS lat long, as almost always a chart has some lat long correction as they were made before the days of GPS. They don’t redraw the chart. They note the correction factor in the legend. I have never seen a chart marked with a correction for sea level rise. If it was happening it would be marked on the charts.

What is most surprising is how small the datum corrections for GPS lat long are on these old charts. They were drawn using sextant and primitive clocks, having sailed halfway around the earth in voyages that took typically 3 years, and have typical clock errors of less than 4 seconds.

Without GPS most modern mariners would be hard pressed to achieve this today, even with radio corrected clocks. The UK and US governments still broadcast a world-wide time signal on 5,10,15 Mhz which is intended primarily for mariners to adjust their clocks for navigation. What was achieved at the time is almost unbelievable, except the charts bear evidence to the quality of their work. We are unlikely to see the same again. Iron men in wooden ships indeed. It is a sad statement on modern science the shoddy results being put forward today.

We spent 20 years sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans using British Admiralty charts. We visited some of the most remote locations on earth using charts drawn more than 200 years ago. What we found is no noticeable sea level change since the BA charts were drawn 2 centuries ago. If a drying rock is marked on the charts, it is still a drying rock today. If a rock is marked awash at low low water, it is still awash at low low water today. If there is sea level rise, it is too small to notice over a span of 200 years, or the rocks are growing at the same rate as the oceans are rising.

“I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking and particularly wirth the guy who seemed to think that two photographs somehow prove that the 4 inches or so of warming claimed for the last 50 yesars an’t possibly have happened.

I have a serious question for you all: Irrespective of what you think of Mann et al, why do “regular commentators” here not call each other on obvious nonsense like that? It would strengthen your case if you did.”

Hmmm, “obvious nonsense”? Not sure I would agree there. Actually, you are both making valid points – the fact is that the models, such as they are, suggest 4inches of sea level rise in 50 years, and on this blog it is pointed out that even if there is 4inches of sea level rise it has made not one jot of difference, not even on the gently shelving beach of the pictures. So we can’t really call out what is said here as “nonsense” – it is actually rather more to the point than the sea level rise figures, which are not related in any direct way to the impact on humanity. The pictures clearly show that there has been no appreciable difference to this beach caused by any sea level rise – whether there has been any sea level rise or not is kind of irrelevant, since the real question is whether we have net loss of land to the sea, and in this case the answer is “no”. In fact, any time anybody has tried to detect this the answer has been “no” – there is actually more land than there was 50 years ago. Now you could claim that this is because the amount of material deposited by great rivers like the Ganges is enough to compensate the sea level rise caused by AGW, but then you would still need to justify the great panic related to AGW related sea level rise.

The easiest way of determining whether sea level rise is likely to be a problem would be to go down to the British Museum and fish out the Admiralty charts to compare the worlds coasts today compared to where they were 50 years ago and 100years ago. But I can tell you that this would only show that the land area has got bigger over the last 50 years and not smaller. Low lying countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives have actually grown significantly. I guess this is why the heavily financed university departments charged with investigating climate change have not undertaken this simple task – they already know it won’t give them the answer they are looking for, so they have stopped looking. When they have had the brass neck to suggest that the Maldives are disappearing under the waves some layman with a few photos has demonstrated that they have got bigger. They just don’t want to go there.

In the matter of ordinary people’s observations of sea level rise, there is a serious conceptual problem that the Warmista must address. If a rise of six inches over a century is undetectable by a person who was at the site for 95 of those years, then why should we expect a rise of two feet to be detectable? If a rise of two feet is not detectable, then why should we care about it? At some point, the scientist who wants to be believed must address the experience of the ordinary citizen.

Exactly! Conjecture that does not integrate with the reality of experience is discarded as irrelevant.

We got the same alarmist story with the Crown of Thorns Starfish ‘plague’ (which if you’re a starfish thrills you no end that your stars are on the rise) which was all mankind’s fault naturally enough (phosphate fertiliser runoff as I recall)

Probably from people collecting the Triton. The Triton has a large, magnificent looking shell which is most often found over peoples mantlepiece. The Triton feeds on the Crown of Thorns and is one its few natural enemies. So, when you see a reef infested with Crown of Thorns, the cause is likely humans collecting the Triton shells.

Similar to the problems with frogs, yes they are caused by humans, but the are wrongly attributed to CO2.

Isn’t it rather amazing that while Mann, politicians, the media, etc, weep & gnash teeth about inches of sea-level rise, while other countries, not handcuffed by idealism, continue to build new land into the ocean to increase living/airport/city space (like Hong Kong, Dubai, etc)? They do this w/confidence that they can overcome or rebuild against any slight sea level rise.

Fear-mongering is designed to be a straight-jacket against modern & proven engineering & construction solutions.

Well, I read it. I’ll have to read it a few more times over the next month or so. Maybe it will grow on me. My initial reactions.

1. They apparently are using Mann, et al’s goofy hockey stick for their temperature data. Even though the paper seems to accept the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, Mann’s reconstruction would seem to be not what you want to use as it seriously lowballs the magnitude of those events.

2. They use some vaguely defined “transfer function” to compute sea level from the information in bottom sediments. I’d like to know how that works, as my gut feeling is that there probably isn’t much water depth data in those sediments.

3. Unconsolidated sediments are notoriously bad news when measuring sea level. My understanding is that when a tidal gauge has to be placed on dirt rather than bedrock, a lot of geodesy is required to keep track of how high the gauge is relative to things that aren’t sinking like a … ahem … rock.

4. They claim their approach is “validated”, but their explanation of how seems to me to resemble the work of a guy with a table, three walnut shells and a pea. Maybe I’m just too dumb to understand. Or maybe …

5. Other than their dating of the core samples, which may well be perfectly OK, there’s nothing here that I find to be overwhelmingly credible. But maybe my understanding will improve with rereading.

John B says:
June 21, 2011 at 4:25 am
“I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking”
====================================================================
John, they did cherry pick.
They picked two North Carolina locations, Sand Point and Tump Point that showed what they wanted.
The most obvious one to use would have been Wilmington, North Carolina.
But Wilmington shows no sea level rise at all since the 70’s.

“Back in the late nineties when he first freaked out over bleached coral, the GBR was all doomed to rapid bleaching which you guessed it hasn’t happened.”

Coral bleaching is a natural process due to changes in water temperature. Corals are sensitive to cold water and as a result grow mostly in the tropics. If warming is a threat to coral, explain why the GBR is most extensive in that part of Australia that is closest to the equator, and ends around Brisbane, as you move away from the equator. You would think that if warming was a threat to coral, that it would be rare on the equator and more numerous in cold water, but just the opposite is true.

Some species of polyps do better in cold water and some do better in hot. As the water heats up the colder adapted species die off and are replaced by warmer adapted species. While this process is underway we see “coral bleaching” as it is the polyps that give the coral its color. The process also occurs in reverse, when temperatures drop.

By far the biggest threat to coral is sedimentation from land clearing. As land is cleared in tropical areas the seasonal rainfall carries large volumes of silt into the oceans which smothers the coral and kills it. Large areas of the tropics that were once white beaches of coral sand are now muddy brown shorelines. Again human caused coral bleaching, but it has nothing to do with CO2.

This is the main problem with AGW and CO2. There are a great many areas in which human activities are causing serious problems and need to be corrected. However, these problems are being wrongly attributed to CO2 and a “one cure fixes all” solution proposed.

Similar to “blood letting” in the past, reducing CO2 will not stop other forms of pollution. Exporting CO2 from developed countries like Australia, USA and the UK to countries like India and China will have no effect whatsoever. If anything it will simply make the problem worse as efficient power plants are replaced with less efficient plants.

The only reason it makes sense is because India and China have low cost labor and industries would rather be subsidized to relocate under the guise of CO2 trading than have to pay the costs themselves. Much better if the taxpayers of Australia, USA and the UK pay to ship their jobs to India and China. In return the politicians can expect a large contribution to their reelection funds. All the while the taxpayers fund the shoddy science to provide the evidence of what a great idea it all is.

I was just thinking of what could be way to test this theory, postcards and photos.
Lots of people since the Victorian times have spent holidays by the sea and as a result we have lots of first hand evidence of where sea level was and now is and many background structures to assist in measurements.

“To credit any type of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (whether it’s a rebound
or a subsidence) t the Atlantic shore regions of North Carolina is superficially
unrealistic or, at worst, deliberately deceptive and misleading.”

I’m not an expert on this, but I infer that any steady change in tide gauge elevation is classified as GIA whether it is related to glaciation or not. The GIA tables accessible from http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/geo_signals/gia/ have GIAs for locations like HONOLULU and DAKAR that clearly haven’t had a glaciation problem in the past few million years.

“Charts are marked with datum corrections, such as WGS84. This gives you and adjustment for GPS lat long, as almost always a chart has some lat long correction as they were made before the days of GPS. They don’t redraw the chart. They note the correction factor in the legend. I have never seen a chart marked with a correction for sea level rise. If it was happening it would be marked on the charts.”

In general, sea level changes aren’t usually going to matter much. They are thought to be about the same magnitude as water level changes due to changes in prevailing winds — a few inches a century. Further, almost shoreline feature on the planet is either sinking or rising a few inches a century. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a discrepancy between casually observed sea level change (near zero except where there is lots of subsidence or oil/water is being pumped out from under the shoreline), Eight inches or so a century (tidal gauge data) and Seventeen inches a century from satellites.

And you can tell from those two photos that the 4 inch or so rise they are claiming over that period must be phoney? Wow!

Actually, you can. You see beaches are sloped. This makes a triangle between the level of the ocean, vertical plane, and the slope of the beach. Now people have actually classified beach slopes, believe it or not.

Now that looks like a fairly gentle beach compared to others I’ve seen/been on. I’d wager it’s at least average if not a mildly sloping beach. So yes, images from the same tide level (itself an oxymoron since no tide is equal) can tell you if the shoreline has moved relative to the sea level or vice versa. Why is it so easy to assume that your eyes are lying to you, but a complicated math function applied to 2000 year old fossilized lifeforms is dead-on accurate in determining your doom?

So wait, (and please bear with me i am no expert in this field) michael mann has produced a paper which splices two data sets together (the former being a proxy based on two, yes just two points on the globe) …. and ignores contrary data (evistat) .all sounding familiar so far….to arrive at a conclusion that this agrees with already exposed as deeply flawed earlier data (hockeystick) . I think this says more about peer review process than anything.

Over here in Germany the “findings” of this “research paper” already made it into newspapers – one nationwide, the FAZ, and at least one local paper. Do Rahmsdorf et al use some of their funds to pay for publicity?
The paper itself is a crime against nature, because it uses up valuable resources (energy for computers and travel, paper, etc.) and does nothing at all to improve our understanding of “mother gaias” ways. Just how can it be that a bunch of charlatans masquerading as scientists are still able to get millons of $ / € for useless activities?!? I certainly wouldn´t mind if the debt crisis in the EU (and the USA) had the effect of ending this waste of resources.

Looking at AGW, the casino that once was a working financiel system, the craze about “renewables”, I can only come to one conclusion: Madness took control. Cleaning up this mess will not be an easy task.

Last not least: Looking for evidence, checking theories or models with reality is what makes the difference between science and fiction. The fact alone that admiralty charts which were drawn 200 years ago are still correct down to the details of drying rocks (thanks to ferd berple for this information) should send the “research paper” directly into the bin.

Those of us who love beaches walk them. In walking them, we are aware that they can change considerably in a matter of 100 feet and they can change dramatically because of nearby storms. But we know them like the backs of our hands. The beach itself is like a beautiful painting that gets more beautiful by the day. So, when I say that the sea level has not risen, it is not like visiting a fresh water lake and saying that the water level is up or down by however many inches. The beach is a manuscript on which the condition of the water is written in fine detail. A change of one inch in sea level would cause dramatic changes in that manuscript.

I’m not an expert on this, but I infer that any steady change in tide gauge elevation is classified as GIA whether it is related to glaciation or not. The GIA tables accessible from http://www.psmsl.org/train_and_info/geo_signals/gia/ have GIAs for locations like HONOLULU and DAKAR that clearly haven’t had a glaciation problem in the past few million years.

Their reasoning goes like this: With the glaciers gone, the “sides” of the “bowl” are rising, increasing the available volume that the water can fill. The adjustment compensates for this apparent deepening of the oceans. Honolulu and Dakar qualify for the adjustment by merely having shorelines. The mean rate of the adjustment is 0.3mm/yr.

So you can watch a particular spot on a shoreline, know for a fact that there has been no change to the sea level for fifty years, but it will be determined from the models the GIA adjustment is 0.3mm/yr, thus there was actually 15mm of rise despite no observed change.

I live on the South West coast of Cumbria, in the UK. One thing I know about coastal areas is that there is this little thing called the tide, which is when the sea comes inland for a few hours, and then it withdraws again, repeating the cycle every 12 hours or so. Maximum and minimum high and low tide, in this area at least, can vary by up to two or three meters in a year.

I’m not familiar with the region under investigation, but I’d assume if it is coastal it is also subject to tides. If so, and if tides can vary by meters in a year (heck, even within a few days) then how can they measure the sea level so accurately via these proxies to be able to say that it varies on the order of tenths of millimeters a year?

This isn’t an objection to the study, it’s a request for information, as there’s obviously somethjing I’m missing.

I have no idea if this paper, as an attempt to produce a credible long history of sea level, is specious, foolhardy, cutting edge or a cogent mainstream bit of work. I doubt many here have any idea either. I suspect it would take quite detailed knowledge of the techniques involved in deriving this sort of data from these sorts of sediments to begin to judge the reliability of the work.

But the issue of sea level rise is one of an indicator of increasing heat content of the climate system. It is only a very long-term danger to human infrastructure.
The few inches to a foot that are ‘measured’ over the last ~century have been called into question on the basis of apparent unchanging coastal features. As a previous poster pointed out the ~4 inches that might have been seen in a human lifetime or photos from the past are well within the wind/tide/waves variation.
But there is another error in the sloping beach argument. –

@- Jeremy says:
June 21, 2011 at 8:09 am
“You see beaches are sloped. This makes a triangle between the level of the ocean, vertical plane, and the slope of the beach.
So if the ocean rises 4 inches in the vertical plane, you would see:
4″/(1/50) = 200 inches of horizontal change or ~ 16 feet difference when seen from directly above (nearly 5 meters)

The geometry is correct.
As long as you assume the the slope of the beach is at an absolute fixed height independent of the ocean. But beaches are dynamic changing objects. They are shaped by the water that washes against them. As the tides/waves wash across it sediments are deposited and removed. The slope may remain the same but it is easy to see how the overall level may alter in response to changing ocean depth so that the apparent position of high/low tide points are the same.

Perhaps if you had a hard bedrock slope on a tectonically stable seashore…

But there is a lot of tide-gauge data and more recent satellite data, recent advances in the field have help clarify the problems with GIA and local discrepancies. Looking for postcards, holiday snaps and personal anecdote seems a less than rigorous way to collect data.
There seems to have been rather little sea level change after the big rises as the major ice-sheets melted ~8000 years ago. But the recent rise looks increasing exceptional in the context of the last few millenia.
It is not that anyone is in imminent danger of flooding – any more than they are from storm and subsidence issues. Its that this amount of change in ocean levels is a big indicator of the amount of energy change happening in the climate.

The reason why the ‘bathtub’ model of ocean levels is wrong, and the implications of the the influence of gravity – falling sea levels in Scotland if all of Greenland’s ice-cap melted!? is well worth waiting for…-grin-

1. I didn’t conflate anything. My reference to cherry picking accusations and the photos were originally in separate posts.

2. The reference to the photos did not call on personal knowledge. Read it again: ”
Here is a picture of Kitty Hawk Beach circa 1950:
And here is a modern view looking the opposite way.
I don’t detect any significant rise in sea level (not accounting for hi/lo tide, etc).”
Pretty sure he is referring to the photos. There is nothing to suggest otherwise.

3. I repeat, it is not cherry picking if you have done it for a reason and you are honest about it. Think about it, if someone else were to do a study using a different method, or a different location, would that be cherry picking? No, it would be a different study. It may or may not show results that agree with this one – that’s science. Anyone else can do a different study, whose results may or may not agree with this one. If you think you can make a serious study from photos, go ahead! OTOH, cherry picking is, for example, showing a graph of the last 10 years temperature, or temperatures from a few chosen locations, and claiming that these “FACTS” debunk AGW (but who would do such a thing)

4. I think the reason for only going up to 2000 has more to do with the kind of data they were using than any wish to “hide the decline”. I think that for two reasons. Firstly, the flattening of the last 10 years would hardly even show up on the results, so why hide it? Secondly, if it had been technically possible to include the last 10 years, I am sure they would have done so to head off the kind of criticisms they are receiving here. I could be wrong. (There’s a quote ripe for mining)

5. I repeat my question: Why don’t you call each other when your buddies post nonsense? Some of you are scientists, I think. You may disagree about the extent and certainty levels of AGW, but you must cringe at some of the satements made here, particularly the “argument from incredulity”, as in “I don’t understand X, so X cannot be true”, where X might be “a trace gas having a measurable effect” or “CO2 being both a feedback and a forcing”. These scientific principles were discovered way before Michael Mann and the IPCC, and the scientists among you know that.

5a. I suppose I have come to realise that the reason you can all get along so well is that you don’t have to actually agree, as long as you all keep bashing the mainstream. After all, it’s not really about the science, is it?

How about showing me your Christmas tree picture again Smokey, that was a real zinger ;-)

“http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/what-glacial-isostatic-adjustment-gia-and-why-do-you-correct-it
Their reasoning goes like this: With the glaciers gone, the “sides” of the “bowl” are rising, increasing the available volume that the water can fill. The adjustment compensates for this apparent deepening of the oceans. Honolulu and Dakar qualify for the adjustment by merely having shorelines. The mean rate of the adjustment is 0.3mm/yr.

…

Yes, that is supposed to make sense, incredible as it seems.”

Well yes, it actually does make sense if you believe that the glaciations depressed the poleward continents and squeezed magma out from under them which then flowed under the ocean basins and more equatorward continental areas. Now it is returning — slowly, ever so slowly. That’s plausible, if not overwhelmingly persuasive.

My problem is that the actual GIA corrections available from PSMSL don’t seem to match that description. For example, they actually have Dakar rising a bit. So I infer that in reality, “GIAs” probably include some (all?) tectonic changes whether they are glacier related or not. If so, I think that’s reasonable other than the nomenclature.

No need to apologize. But I think the stress of trying to prove climate disruption is getting to you. You’re replying to two separate posts that I didn’t make here. Lie down, relax, and repeat after me: “Serenity now…” : -)

John B, it’s a blog. Not a science journal. All sorts of people post here, some make sense some don’t. By and large there’s a lot of silly stuff but there are also gems of wisdom. It’s not necessary for someone to take every post as scientifically sound. It’s discussion.

Re my point about anecdotal evidence, sure that’s not science. But the practical physical effects of science are what the whole AGW case is about. And if sea levels are rising at historically unprecedented rates, then at some point it must become obvious. Now, not at some indeterminate future date.

If it is not obvious, then there is a discrepancy that causes one to wonder, surely?

You have not spent a lot of time on Florida’s beaches, have you? However, your response is nonsense regardless of your familiarity with beaches. If a person’s experience of a beach is not going to be changed by a rise in sea levels then why should that person care about a rise in sea levels? You say because a rise in sea levels measures changes in the energy in the oceans. But that just invites the same question again: why should a beachcomber care about a rise in the energy in the oceans if it is not going to change the beach? Like all good Warmista, your ploy is to attempt to move away from actual human experience of the environment to some theoretical claim about the environment. You are engaging in a fancy form of Changing The Subject Without Seeming To. Do you have anything to say about human experience of beaches on the East Coast of the USA? That is the topic.

“2. The reference to the photos did not call on personal knowledge. Read it again: ”
Here is a picture of Kitty Hawk Beach circa 1950:
And here is a modern view looking the opposite way.
I don’t detect any significant rise in sea level (not accounting for hi/lo tide, etc).”
Pretty sure he is referring to the photos. There is nothing to suggest otherwise.”

I politely clarified that matter for you and explained that such use of photos should be backed by personal experience. It is the personal experience that matters.

Mr Mann, 150 years of data is not a statistically valid sample set for making judgements on the significance of slight variations in temperature and sea level … sea level has varied hugely since mankind first trod the earth … nothing to see here …

I would like to comment on your points 4 and 5 in https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/20/manns-new-sea-level-hockey-stick-paper/#comment-685904:“4. I think the reason for only going up to 2000 has more to do with the kind of data they were using than any wish to “hide the decline”. I think that for two reasons. Firstly, the flattening of the last 10 years would hardly even show up on the results, so why hide it? Secondly, if it had been technically possible to include the last 10 years, I am sure they would have done so to head off the kind of criticisms they are receiving here. I could be wrong.”

The problem is that Mann has cherry-picking “form”, so this kind of defence will carry little weight here. Especially as there was other blatant cherry-picking, as pointed out by others here.

I do agree with you that that “the flattening of the last 10 years” is not needed. Look at figures 2(B) and 2(C), and you can see two things very clearly (I am not the first to point this out): (1) The sea-level rise started before 1900. See the last “change point” in 2(C), also clearly visible in 2(B). It could not have been caused by man-made CO2. (2) The sea-level rise started flattening around 1980. This is clearly visible in 2(B). If man-made CO2 were the cause, the rise would have been maintained or accelerating.

“5. I repeat my question: Why don’t you call each other when your buddies post nonsense? Some of you are scientists, I think. You may disagree about the extent and certainty levels of AGW, but you must cringe at some of the satements made here, particularly the “argument from incredulity”, as in “I don’t understand X, so X cannot be true”, where X might be “a trace gas having a measurable effect” or “CO2 being both a feedback and a forcing”. These scientific principles were discovered way before Michael Mann and the IPCC, and the scientists among you know that.”

Yes, I do cringe sometimes. Sometimes I comment accordingly, sometimes others do, and sometimes I just let it go through to the keeper because there are more important things to comment on, or more important things for my time. The issues of real importance are that this whole man-made global warming hypothesis (MMAGW) is based on computer modelling which when analysed is highly suspect, and which is disproved in many very important ways by actual evidence. [The Mann sea-level graph I mention in this comment is just one of many examples]. The frustration that I and I am sure many others feel comes from the refusal of the supporters of MMAGW to acknowledge the evidence, their success in intimidating and demonising those who try to draw attention to it, and their influence on the media and on politicians.

I am hopeful that this is about to change, but the developed world is now on the verge of serious damage – some parts such as Spain have already suffered serious damage – and like Waterloo it could be a close-run thing.

Thank you for your polite and well reasoned response. I would differ with you on one vtially important point, though. MMAGW (to use your term) is not based on modeling. It uses models, because they are useful tools, but it is based on the following:

1. Physical theory (Arrhenius onwards) predicts that increasesd GHGs will cause an energy imbalance, which will in turn cause warming
2. That warming has been observed, as have indirect effects of it (e.g. sea level rise)
3. The observed effects correlate with the predicted “fingerprints” of emissions of GHGs
4. The observed effects do not correlate with any other plausible effect (e.g. the correlation with solar output breaks down in about the last 40 years)

Say what!
The only “names” I “called you” were my saying (at June 21, 2011 at 6:45 am);

“Firstly, as you admit (in the same post) you are considered as being a resident troll by people who often debate in threads of WUWT. Hence, you are ignored (indeed, your post that I am complains at Bob Tisdale failing to count your posts as troll ‘invasion’).”

And I again used the phrase “resident troll” in my concluding paragraph.

Please note that I was replying to your post at June 21, 2011 at 4:25 am where you asked Bob Tisdale;
“Should I be pleased you no longer consider me a troll?”
in respose to him having said he saw no comments from trolls in the thread.

I was replying to your post that complained at your not having been listed as a troll. So, I applied simple courtesy by using the title you had claimed for yourself in your post which I answered. That is not “name calling”.

A quick question, asked from ignorance, for the more learned here. I understand the aim of the various calculations of sea level rise are to indicate that sea levels are indeed rising. AGW theory suggests that as ice melts and temps rise, the sea level must rise accordingly, hence the dangers of land being flooded. Ignoring for a moment what might happen if sea levels DID rise by a metre or more, the thing i am most curious about is what is actually happening.

In which case, is not the raw unadjusted tide guage data what we want to see? It’s not especially relevant at a local level what the sea level is doing on average globally against some standard benchmark (incidentally, what IS sea level measured against?). Rather, what my local guage shows over the course of the past 50 years is exactly what has happened relative to my physical location. In other words, if the tide guage shows that high tide now is several millimetres higher than it was in say 1940, then clearly at my location, something is happening. If we observe the rate of that rise to be increasing, then on balance something out of the ordinary is happening.

So, what is the situation for raw unadjjusted tide guage data around the world for the past 50 years? or is that not at all relevant?

John B says: The man-made global warming hypothesis “is not based on modeling. It uses models, because they are useful tools, but it is based on the following:
1. Physical theory (Arrhenius onwards) predicts that increasesd GHGs will cause an energy imbalance, which will in turn cause warming
2. That warming has been observed, as have indirect effects of it (e.g. sea level rise)
3. The observed effects correlate with the predicted “fingerprints” of emissions of GHGs
4. The observed effects do not correlate with any other plausible effect (e.g. the correlation with solar output breaks down in about the last 40 years)”

1. Arrhenius did indeed put forward that theory. You will be hard pressed to find many sceptics who dispute it. More below.
2. Warming was indeed observed in the latter part of the 20th century, but no-one has succeeded in proving that man-made CO2 was the cause. I will make it easier for you by stating that I am reasonably satisfied that the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 in this period was largely man-made (others may disagree), and that the sea-level rise is very likely because of the higher temperatures. However, there are a lot of problems with the CO2-temperature link: The warming in late 20thC went for about 30 years, and appears to have stopped. This tallies well with a warm PDO phase, meaning that the observed global warming was more likely to have been related to the PDO than CO2. There have been many periods of warming which have clearly not been caused by CO2, the latest being in the first half of 20thC, where the warming was very similar to the latest warming..
3. I am not sure what you mean by GHG “fingerprints“. The main “fingerprint” that I am aware of is shown in the IPCC report in Fig 9.1(c). The basic hypothesis (which, incidentally, is not explained in the IPCC report, something which I find remarkable) is that sunlight passes through the atmosphere and warms Earth’s surface. From there it is radiated as IR, which is partially intercepted by GHGs while the rest escapes to space. Man-made CO2 causes an increase in the interception of IR, and hence causes Earth to lose less energy, and hence causes global warming. The place where this process mostly occurs is in the troposphere over the tropics, as is clearly shown in IPCC report AR4 Fig 9.1(c) and (f). A very reasonable test of the hypothesis is therefore to compare the rate of change of temperature in the tropical troposphere with that at the surface. If the troposphere warms more, then the hypothesis is verified (NB. not proved), but if the surface warms more, then the hypothesis is disproved. Others (Roy Spencer, eg) have done more sophisticated analyses than me, and found the hypothesis disproved, but FWIW here is my simple analysis:
These are the RSS tropical (all available data) and Hadley global temperatures (over the same period) graphed. All data was downloaded this month. The RSS are plotted as a rolling 12-month average, the Hadley as annual averages (because that was the easiest way of doing it). The main feature to my eye is that an El Nino temporarily heats the troposphere more than the surface, but that for the rest of the time the troposphere appears to warm less. [Note: El Nino is not caused by CO2]. The linear trends (MS Excel Trend()) confirm this: Mid-Troposphere 0.11 degC/decade, Lower T 0.13, surface 0.15. The further you get from the surface, the less it warms. The trends from 1987 onwards (when RSS Troposphere/Stratosphere started) are a bit more marked, in spite of the El Nino late in the period. (The stratosphere was expected to cool anyway). The implication is surely very clear : the warming starts at the surface and flows from there to the atmosphere.
4. That the observed effects do not correlate well with any plausible natural cause is no reason to suppose that they must be caused by CO2. As Smokey points out, that is an “argument from ignorance”. The observed effects do not correlate at all well with CO2 either, as I explain in 2 above. There is the additional problem of the tropical troposphere, plus a number of others that I haven’t covered (eg. the non-warming Antarctic, slowing sea-levels, etc).

There is one more point that I should cover here. man-made global warming is not based only on Arrhenius’ theory. That gives a bit less than 40% of the IPCC’s claimed warming. The rest is claimed to come from “feedbacks”. By far the largest “feedback” is from clouds – the IPCC even claims that it delivers more warming than the CO2 does in the first place. Yet for cloud feedback there is no mechanism, it comes only from computer models, as explained in the IPCC report AR4 para 8.6.2.3 : “the GCMs all predict a positive cloud feedback .. but strongly disagree on its magnitude” or in para 10.3.2.2 : “The change in mean cloud radiative forcing has been shown to have different signs in a limited number of previous modelling studies … Figure 10.11a shows globally averaged cloud radiative forcing changes for 2080 to 2099 under the A1B scenario for individual models of the data set, which have a variety of different magnitudes and even signs. The ensemble mean change is –0.6 W m–2. This range indicates that cloud feedback is still an uncertain feature of the global coupled models …”

“… is not the raw unadjusted tide guage data what we want to see? It’s not especially relevant at a local level what the sea level is doing on average globally against some standard benchmark (incidentally, what IS sea level measured against?). Rather, what my local guage shows over the course of the past 50 years is exactly what has happened relative to my physical location. In other words, if the tide guage shows that high tide now is several millimetres higher than it was in say 1940, then clearly at my location, something is happening. If we observe the rate of that rise to be increasing, then on balance something out of the ordinary is happening.

So, what is the situation for raw unadjjusted tide guage data around the world for the past 50 years? or is that not at all relevant?”

With respect, you answer your own questions concerning relevance.

Average sea level rise around the entire world is pertinent to assessments of recovery from the last Ice Age and considerations of putative AGW. As you suggest, it is very small (about 2 mm per year) and, therefore, has little if any relevance to relative sea level change at any individual locality in the context of a human lifetime.

At most individual places the important consideration is change to the height of the land surface relative to the centre of the Earth. This is most important because it can be much more rapid than the effect of change to average global sea level. It can be both very large andvery rapid as a result of an earthquake. Plate tectonics and recovery from the last Ice Age provide longer term (persistent) changes to the height of the land surface relative to the centre of the Earth.

An example of longer term tectonic changes is the increasing height of the Himalayas.

And Britain is an example of a change that is recovery from the last Ice Age. Scotland was loaded down by kilometers thickness of ice only 12,000 years ago. The weight of the ice pushed Scotland down and it sank towards the centre of the Earth. So, Britain tilted: Scotland went down and the SE of England rose up. But the ice melted with the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. The loading on Scotland is gone and Britain is tilting back: Scotland is ‘floating’ back up and the SE of England is sinking back down (this is an example of ‘isostatic rebound’). So, London needs increasingly expensive flood controls because it is sinking at a rate of about 3 mm per year and, therefore, has a sea level rise of about (2+3) mm per year; i.e. about 5 mm per year.

Mike Jonas says:
June 21, 2011 at 11:41 pm
…The change in mean cloud radiative forcing has been shown to have different signs in a limited number of previous modelling studies

And there are only 2 signs available. + and -. The behaviour of the global atmosphere, in both naive and sophisticated terms, makes far more sense with strong negative feedbacks preventing any “runaway” conditions from developing, and the prime candidate for a negative feedback against GHG warming is cloud cover. Which is a strong vote for the “-” sign.

The grotesque contortions that the AGW “scientists” and their toy GHG models have to go through to make clouds hold more heat in than they block are symptomatic of the distorted assumptions they are trying to establish and salvage. They should be ignored and disregarded, the lot of them.

He reduced it to pretty much what is now accepted – 1.5C, 2.1 with water vapour

2. Steric sea level rise [due to thermal expansion] is falling rapidly. The decline in global temperatures over the past two years matches it. Where is your god now?

No god. Of ourse it is not rising over the last 10 years, beause temperatures have been flat(ish). But whemn temperatures ris, it rises.

3. The models repeatedly predicted a tropospheric hot spot; the “fingerprint of AGW”. That was another wrong prediction.

No, still a fingerprint of warming in from any cause, still likely measurement error, and the hotspt has now bewn measuredm, at least short term. Look it up in any mainstreram source.

4. That’s the alarmists’ constantly used Argumentum ad Ignorantium. “Since we can’t figure out the causes of natural variability, then the observed variability must be due to CO2.” As if.

Not true! The argument is that they have looked at what n”naturalk variability” would cause, and it doesn’t match reality.

And CAGW is, in fact, based on models, not empirical evidence…

Not true. Look it up in any mainstream source.

Because there is no evidence!

There is only “no evidence” if you won’t accept mainstream evidence, and you won’t. Everything you post is from well-known contrrarians, blogs, journalists, politicians. Any evidence that does not support your view, you discount. if you can’t find flaws in the science, you accuse the sientists of lying. If umpteen studies ome up with the same result, you accuse them af collusion. And then you accept a couple of photographs as “FACT”.

But you agree with everyone here, because warming is caused by ABC (Anything But C2)

Thanks Richard S for your explanation. But I was more coming from the anecdotal point of view. I am wondering what raw unadjusted tide data around the world shows. If sea level rise is a major issue, and here in Australia claims are made that we can expect rises up to a metre over the next 80 odd years, then at some point that rise must exceed the natural forces of tectonic adjustment else we wouldn’t be facing calamity. In other words, it must be VISIBLE.

Many commenters have suggested that they aren’t aware of local changes – that where they are there is no evidence of any rise over the past 50 years. So, what does raw unadjusted tide data actually show? Because that data shows the actual physical effect at that location and would show whether anecdotal evidence has any basis.

Now you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing. I produced verifiable links and you replied with your opinion. And you really shouldn’t drink before responding. Your comments are hard to read with all the errors.

Finally, I said nothing about any photographs, where did you come up with that? And claiming that “Everything you post is from well-known contrrarians, blogs, journalists, politicians” is simply wrong. I posted 3 charts: satellite data showing steric sea level change, a chart by Bill Illis showing the decline in temperature from 2010 to mid-2011 based on UAH data, and a chart from a peer reviewed [and never falsified] paper by McKitrick et. al, falsifying the GCMs that predicted the tropospheric hot spot. In response, you posted your opinion, saying I won’t accept “mainstream evidence”. Earth to John B: There is no evidence!

John B, you say “Of ourse it is not rising over the last 10 years, beause temperatures have been flat(ish). But whemn temperatures ris, it rises.”

But isn’t the AGW case that CO2 driven warming trumps natural variation? That is why we face disaster. So, at a time when CO2 continues its inexorable rise, surely we should see the same rise in temps and hence sea level? After all, CO2 has only been rising at an unnatural rate comparatively recently, and temp rises are closely correlated. That’s where the notion of AGW arises – this tight correlation.

So, what natural variation is it that now trumps the hitherto primary effect of CO2?

I stopped by RealClimate today and read Stefan’s post on the new sea level hockey stick. Towards the end of his post in the required section “Connection to Climate” he states the following:

“According to this model, the rise after about 1000 AD is due to the warm medieval temperatures and the stable sea level after 1400 AD is a consequence of the cooler “Little Ice Age” period. Then follows a steep rise associated with modern global warming.”

Does this mean that the Team now acknowledges the MWP and LIA? I don’t seem to recall that these natural climate variations featured prominently in Mann’s original hockey stick? Or did I miss something?

Even without datum adjustment, the shape of the Kemp supplemental data is inconsistent with the Amsterdam data.

The American Council on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) published a document in 2008 “Understanding Sea Level Change (No. 236, December) that provides an explanation of this complex subject. In particular, it explains the importance of local mean sea level in terms of its legal definition.

Graeme M said “So, what natural variation is it that now trumps the hitherto primary effect of CO2?”

Good question. Solar minimum and La Ninas certainly play a part, but 10 years is not very long. If it doesn’t start warming again soon, AGW is in trouble, but not yet. “15 years without warming” has been quoted as where the models start to look flaky. At the moment they are spot on, as long as you don’t cherry pick or distort the data.

The more I study all of this the more I worry about the good name of science, Mann really is damaging science and to what purpose, his own ego and bank balance? In that respect he is very similar to Al Gore.

Graeme M said “So, what natural variation is it that now trumps the hitherto primary effect of CO2?”

Easily. The effect of CO2 (IF any) is EASILY trumped by natural factors and variations. This was one of the most important arguments from sceptics against CO2GW. But bureaucrats did not listen to science.

If there was any significant CO2 warming effect, climate system would be very unstable without some strong limiting factors (negative feedbacks). Any small variation in global temperature would be amplified. Ocean temperatures have BIG impact on atmospheric CO2. CO2, on the other hand, very likely has no significant/measurable effect on global temperature. When you observe temporal global temperature variations (seasonal, annual and longer timescales), you can SEE how easily CO2 is trumped. Anytime the temperature wants go down, it goes down, no matter how fast the CO2 is rising at that time. It is always at the maximum “CO2 forcing” that the temperature shifts from warming to cooling and vice versa.

We can observe it now on decadal time scales. CO2 forcing is on maximum, but the temperature decelerated and started to decrease. Soon, the atmospheric CO2 will follow.

Edim said “Soon, the atmospheric CO2 will follow”. How do you figure that? I can see why you might doubt that CO2 caused the warming, but are you also doubting the the CO2 was from human emissions at all?

John B, an interesting question. Few would doubt CO2 emissions are on the rise due to human influence, but is science so accurate that it knows definitively the potential mechanisms for remediation by the total earth system? Science will always be limited by the human nervous system – the brain is not a foolproof computing device. Its tendency to seek patterns and then identify confirmatory evidence is well known. So it would not surprise me that if the agreed view is that increasing CO2 is overwhelming the earth’s natural mechanisms we should see models and evidence that demonstrate exactly that. But what if… that is simply wrong?

I doubt it, but presumably it won’t take long to see if Edim’s prediction holds, hmmm?

Graeme M said: “Science will always be limited by the human nervous system – the brain is not a foolproof computing device. Its tendency to seek patterns and then identify confirmatory evidence is well known.”

I agree, the brain seeks patterns and finds them even when they are not there, e.g. Jesus’ face in a grilled cheese sandwich. But science is all about combating that. Science, by rigorously analysing the data, tries to find the real patterns. It might look, for example, like sea level doesn’t change beause photos look the same over 50 years, or that sea level changes dramatically because the Romans had ports where it is now 10 miles inland, but science tries to look behind that and pick apart what is really happening. I go with the science every time. Maybe that is just because I am a scientist.

John B says : “10 years is not very long. If it doesn’t start warming again soon, AGW is in trouble, but not yet. “15 years without warming” has been quoted as where the models start to look flaky. At the moment they are spot on, as long as you don’t cherry pick or distort the data.”

Actually, the models look flaky for the 30 years before WWII, because the temperatures rose strongly while CO2 did not, and they look flaky for the 30 years after WWII when temperatures fell while CO2 was rising strongly. The last 10 years, together with the earlier 60-odd years, are easily enough to disprove the models, which have only managed to be on song for 30 years in a century.. I note that you have not replied to my comment https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/20/manns-new-sea-level-hockey-stick-paper/#comment-686300, addressed to you, in which I explain how other physical observations also disprove the models, and how the models are built on supposition (cloud feedback).

Maybe we could pick back up on just how the oceans are warming. Sea level rise is attributed to many things but AGW’ers think it is because the ocean is absorbing far infrared heat re-emitted by greenhouse gases to such a degree that it is significantly related to this rise: more greenhouse gas – more atmospheric heat re-entering the oceans at the sea surface – warmer ocean – greater sea level rise. There are lots of “papers” out there that say the oceans are anthropogenically warming. They link correlation with an as yet unmechanized cause. So they usually don’t specify the mechanism or show their maths. They just state that it does. Kind of like Sunners who state that it is the Sun.

Papers and bloggers who link ocean warming with AGW heat transfer from the air to the ocean should be required to prove it. State the mechanism and show the maths.

“If the troposphere warms more, then the hypothesis is verified (NB. not proved), but if the surface warms more, then the hypothesis is disproved. Others (Roy Spencer, eg) have done more sophisticated analyses than me, and found the hypothesis disproved,”

I have not had chance to look at look at cloud feedback, but on the tropospheric hotspot…

I went through this at great length before, to no avail. So, to repeat, the tropospheric hotpsot is not a signature of GHGs. Of course, no one here believes me, so how about Dr. Roy Spencer himself (emphasis mine):

“But the hotspot is not a unique signature of manmade greenhouse gases. It simply reflects anomalous heating of the troposphere — no matter what its source. Anomalous heating gets spread throughout the depth of the troposphere by convection, and greater temperature rise in the upper troposphere than in the lower troposphere is because of latent heat release (rainfall formation) there.

For instance, a natural decrease in cloud cover would have had the same effect. It would lead to increased solar warming of the ocean, followed by warming and humidifying of the global atmosphere and an acceleration of the hydrologic cycle.

Thus, while possibly significant from the standpoint of indicating problems with feedbacks in climate models,the lack of a hotspot no more disproves manmade global warming than the existence of the hotspot would have proved manmade global warming. At most, it would be evidence that the warming influence of increasing GHGs in the models has been exaggerated, probably due to exaggerated positive feedback from water vapor.”

“Edim said “Soon, the atmospheric CO2 will follow”. How do you figure that? I can see why you might doubt that CO2 caused the warming, but are you also doubting the the CO2 was from human emissions at all?”

John,

I think more of the atmospheric CO2 increase (~1960 – ~2000) was from the warming than from anthropogenic emissions. I also think that natural CO2 cycle(s)/fluxes are still uncertain, but it can still be concluded that natural inputs/outputs are overwhelming, compared to anthropogenic input. Furthermore, even variations of natural inputs/outputs are overwhelming, compared to ACO2 input.

We have a test in the making, thanks to nature. If the cooling continues, which is very likely, I predict atmospheric CO2 will decrease.

John B – re the last para that you quote from Roy Spencer “Thus, while possibly significant from the standpoint of indicating problems with feedbacks in climate models, the lack of a hotspot no more disproves manmade global warming than the existence of the hotspot would have proved manmade global warming. At most, it would be evidence that the warming influence of increasing GHGs in the models has been exaggerated, probably due to exaggerated positive feedback from water vapor.“. [my bold]

Please note that I drew attention to the lack of a tropical troposphere hotspot precisely in the context of feedbacks and exaggeration of the warming effects of GHGs. Also please note that I didn’t claim that “the lack of a hotspot” disproved AGW, but that the failure of the tropical troposphere to warm as much as the surface did disprove AGW (check my original wording “if the surface warms more, then the hypothesis is disproved“). A subtle distinction maybe, but very important.

I am trying to unsderstand your subtle distinction. I thought that in common usage, the “lack of a hotspot” is synonymous with “the surface warms more”. Are you saying they are different things? can you provide links to others making this subtle distinction?

It seems we agree that the lack or otherwise of a tropospheric hotspot does not disprove AGW. On what is your claim that ““if the surface warms more, then the hypothesis is disproved“ based?

John – “lack of a hotspot” includes the situation where there is no discernable difference. Under the AGW hypothesis, the warming begins in the tropical troposphere and the heat flows by various means from there to the surface. Under that hypothesis, it is therefore not possible for the tropical troposphere to heat by less than the surface. It is possible, however, if the heat distribution mechanisms are efficient, for the the surface to warm at virtually the same rate.

If the surface warms more than the troposphere – as it does indeed appear to do – then the extra heat cannot be flowing primarily from the troposphere to the surface. If there is any connection between troposphere and surface (and I think everyone agrees that there is), then the extra heat must be flowing from the surface to the troposphere.

“Because it is warm, the surface radiates far IR thermal radiation that consists of wavelengths that are predominantly much longer than the wavelengths that were absorbed. Most of this thermal radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and re-radiated both upwards and downwards; that radiated downwards is absorbed by the Earth’s surface.”

i.e. the greenhouse effect warms the surface (which then warms the lower atmosphere)

John B once again tries to re-frame the discussion, this time away from what Mike Jonas wrote. Why? Because the “fingerprint of AGW”, the tropo hotspot, never appeared as widely predicted by the alarmist crowd, as shown by Prof Ross McKittrick: click

As Mike Jonas pointed out, the 2nd Law does not allow a net heat flow from a colder [troposphere] to a warmer region [land], thus debunking the predictions by the warmist contingent. John B can either admit the predictions were wrong… or tapdance.

The explanation in Wikipedia is essentially correct. What happens is this (direct Wiki quotes are in italics):

Solar radiation at the high frequencies of visible light passes through the atmosphere to warm the planetary surface […]. This process happens all the time, and at this stage has no connection with global warming. It is simply saying that the continuous stream of sunlight warms the surface. The significance of the high frequencies is that they pass through the atmospheric GHGs with very little absorption on their way to the surface. The part that you quoted – “because it is warm […]” – is saying simply that the the surface is warm (from the sun), and it is not yet a reference to global warming.

[…] which then emits this energy at the lower frequencies of infrared thermal radiation. Again, this is a continuous process and still has no connection with global warming, not quite yet.

But now the AGW hypothesis kicks in: [the outgoing] Infrared radiation is absorbed by greenhouse gases, which in turn re-radiate much of the energy to the surface and lower atmosphere.. Because there are more GHGs in the atmosphere than there used to be – attributed to man-made emissions – AGW hypothesis says that more of the outgoing IR is absorbed and re-radiated back to (amongst other places) the surface. It is significant that the mechanism here is that when the GHGs absorb the outgoing IR, they heat up, and it is the extra heat that causes them to re-radiate more IR. In other words, the increase in re-radiated IR is driven only by the higher temperature of the GHGs. Because the surface is now receiving more re-radiated IR than it was before, it doesn’t cool quite as fast as it did, ie. it warms up. The significance of the “lower frequencies” is that, unlike the original higher frequencies of the incoming sunlight, these frequencies are absorbed by the GHGs.

So, according to AGW hypothesis, the global warming begins when GHGs in the tropical troposphere heat up. It is shown pictorially in IPCC report AR4 Fig. 9.1(c).

The extra IR returned by the troposphere GHGs to the surface is generated by extra heat in the GHGs. The amount by which it heats the surface cannot be more than the amount by which the troposphere has heated. Actual temperature measurements indicate that the surface has in fact warmed more.

Virtually no-one disputes the basic mechanism involving IR and GHGs. But there is dispute over whether the GHGs have reached the limit of their ability to absorb and re-radiate IR (in which case there will be no further warming from this mechanism), and even if they haven’t reached their limit, there is dispute over the extent of the extra warming. If the mechanism is, as claimed, responsible for most of the observed temperature increase, then the tropical troposphere must warm by more than the surface. It does not. Therefore something else must be causing most of the warming.

“When electromagnetic radiation is incident on matter, it causes the charged particles to oscillate and gain energy. The ultimate fate of this energy depends on the situation. It could be immediately re-radiated and appear as scattered, reflected, or transmitted radiation. It may also get dissipated into other microscopic motions within the matter, coming to thermal equilibrium and manifesting itself as thermal energy in the material.”

In the GH effect, it is the re-radiation that is important. Some of the energy absorbed by the GHGs get “dissipated” and becomes “thermal energy” (i.e. warms up the atmosphere), but the re-radiated portion does not change the temperature of the atmosphere. In a gas, the ratio of re-radiated energy vs. dissipated energy if much higher than in a solid or a liquid due to the relatively long time between collisions of gas molecules. That is why the IR energy is <primarily scattered by the GHGs in the atmosphere, but primarily dissipated (i.e. absorbed as warming) at the surface.

Apologies if I described it poorly but that is, as I understand it, the generally acepted explanation.

And back to the hotspot, it is not caused by the GH effect. It is caused by the “moist adiabatic lapse rate”. Hence, as even Dr. Roy Spencer agrees (not an appeal to authority, just an interesting example), the tropical tropospheric hotspot is not a signature of AGW.

John B – I am going partly by logic and partly by the IPCC report eg. 9.2.2.1 “Greenhouse gas forcing is expected to produce warming in the troposphere, cooling in the stratosphere, and, for transient simulations, somewhat more warming near the surface in the NH due to its larger land fraction, which has a shorter surface response time to the warming than do ocean regions (Figure 9.1c). […] The simulated responses to natural forcing are distinct from those due to the anthropogenic forcings described above. Solar forcing results in a general warming of the atmosphere (Figure 9.1a)“. [my bold]

I am also going by observation. Observation, that is, (a) that there isn’t an observation that tallies with the IPCC report, and (b) that the AGW scientists (Sherwood, eg.) have tried desperately to show that there is.

There is only one reference to adiabatic lapse rate that I can see in the IPCC report, in 8.6.3.1.1 “At low latitudes, GCMs show negative lapse rate feedback because of their tendency towards a moist adiabatic lapse rate, producing amplified warming aloft. “. It doesn’t look like that is happening either, or maybe it too is weaker than the natural forces that the IPCC has missed.

Smokey – you say “As Mike Jonas pointed out, the 2nd Law does not allow a net heat flow from a colder [troposphere] to a warmer region [land], thus debunking the predictions by the warmist contingent.“.

That isn’t actually what I was saying, though it might have sounded like it. The part of the AGW hypothesis that I was addressing doesn’t require a net heat flow from a colder region to a hotter region, it only requires the rate of net heat flow from the hotter region to decrease. But the fact does still remain that it isn’t possible for an increase in temperature in the colder region to produce a greater increase in temperature in the hotter region. I have done back-of-envelope calcs based on Stefan-Bolzmann, and get a factor of around 2 at equilibrium, but that is of course not the real-world situation. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_dataset says “Climate models predict … in the tropics, the troposphere should warm about 1.5 times more than the surface“, and SPPI http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html says “Within the tropical “hot-spot” at about 8 to 12 km altitude, the [predicted] rate of increase in warming is more than twice and up to three times the rate of increase in warming at the Earth’s surface.“. Better references would be nice. I don’t think the IPCC report puts a specific figure on it.

In an earlier comment, I said re the AGW hypothesis “… it is therefore not possible for the tropical troposphere to heat by less than the surface. It is possible, however, if the heat distribution mechanisms are efficient, for the the surface to warm at virtually the same rate.“. On reflection, I don’t think the latter part of that is correct – I think the troposphere does actually have to warm at a greater rate. However, what I did say gave AGW a lower hurdle, and it still failed.